The Big Bang Theory
by 0-mirage-0
Summary: Capturing Ed's eleven-year-old life between his loss of limbs and automail. [Tragedy/Heartbreak/Graphic Scenes]. You will enjoy this read.
1. Golden Iris

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The Big Bang Theory  
Chapter One  
_Golden Iris_

- mirage-

With Pinako's heart thudding in her ears, and the panic of it all causing her mouth to go dry, she felt very much the way she did when she received news her son had been killed.

The call had been unexpected. She took it in the kitchen, with Winry and the Elric boys playing in the living room. There was no forewarning. The phone rang, everything changed, and then she was alone.

Standing mute holding the receiver, her body was motionless, but her mind was a hornet's nest.

What happened that day, in spontaneity and cruelty, was happening again tonight.

In her downstairs guest bedroom Pinako was frantically stripping the neglected twin bed, when she realized Alphonse's suit of armor was standing motionless in the middle of the room. She looked at him; the youngest Elric boy. The tiny child with a mop of blond hair and a goofy ear to ear smile, swallowed up, and somehow inside the distantly familiar set of armor she knew the Elric's owned. The rain water made him shine, as if he were polished and new, when in fact he was coated in old dust, with spider webs from Trisha's basement matted down and pasted to him. The front breast plate was still tinged with pink, but the blood had run off like the water, and was everywhere in his large footprint puddles.

In the middle of the tiny bedroom he stood like a tree, growing upward and towering over them. It made her nervous. It was more than just the sheer height of him, it was the sheer mass of him! He barely fit through the guest bedroom doorway in height, and she was fairly certain he had turned to the side to manage in width!

With an unchanging mask of a face, she couldn't tell what he was thinking, she couldn't even be certain where he was looking. When he arrived his stone cold metal body had been screaming with the voice of a ten year old echoing outward from somewhere deep inside. _There was much she still didn't understand._ She didn't have the whole picture. She wasn't exactly sure what had happened before the last twenty minutes, but what she did know, was that he was idle, at a moment when there was plenty to do.

She called to him, and had never pronounced his name in such a tone before that hour. "_Alphonse!_" Her voice was pinched and crazed as if she were rabid. The sound of her scared him, and his entire body jerked. The metal head twisted towards her on command, and the emptiness of it, the hallow possession of it, made her ill. She stopped ripping the sheets up and pointed to the guest bedroom's attached lavatory. "Stop standing there like a damn bell tower, and get'ure brother from the tub!"

Alphonse took one graceless step backwards. About the hinges and joints his body clattered as he tried to move. His spirit animating the armor was as uncoordinated as a flesh child inside trying to work it. His footfalls were pots and pans on her hardwood floor, and the entire visual of him moving was catastrophic.

"Hurry it up!" Pinako yelled impatiently.

Winry hurried out of Alphonse's way as if he might crush her. She ran to Pinako's side and took hold of her Grandmother's dress staring wide-eyed. Alphonse looked more like a gargantuan metal marionette than anything she could recognize as her close friend.

"Hurry it up!" Pinako felt ruthless.

"Grandma," Winry whispered, tugging at Pinako's dress with concern.

Pinako brushed Winry's hands off, and shoved the balled up top sheet into the girl's arms. This year she was going to be fifty nine and had seen fifty eight years of use. She had helped build her house, raise animals, contributed to the birth of six children, Winry, Edward, and Alphonse included, and stubbornly maintained residence when things became hot over in Ishval. Now this bit of extreme panic and blood wasn't going to stop her. Of this she was certain, and she took hold of this thought with blind commitment. She would do this, that was all there was to it. She would do this somehow, or he might really die.

As Pinako instructed, Alphonse went to get Ed. He tried to walk into the narrow lavatory doorway, but as a suit of armor, didn't fit, and hit the wall with a thundering sound and bounced back.

Winry watched this, hanging onto Pinako's dress, and whispered a faint distressed, "Grandma?"

Alphonse's shoulders were smashing into the woodwork, and the defensive spiking shoulder pads were digging into the sheetrock. He felt this as much as they might feel their sweater catch and pull. It wasn't stopping him, hell it wasn't even slowing him down. Winry's jaw was a silent yawn of horror, and inside the armor Alphonse was gibbering like a mouse in a tin can. He sounded frustrated and even angry, and there was something nerve wracking about considering him angry. He was destroying a doorframe in obedient assistance. What in god's good name would he do, could he do, if he became upset?

"Winry, you don't get close to him," Pinako said firmly, keeping her voice down. She grabbed the towel she'd carried into the room and snapped it open. "He'll step on you like an ant," Pinako said. "He can't control himself well."

In what looked to be a subconscious gesture of stress, Winry began running her hand over the small pocket of her pink and yellow sundress. By all accounts she was beginning to look like an unassuming girl tossed into a nightmare. Dressed for summer with her hair pulled back and her pink flip flops framing her painted toe nails, she was going pale, and starting to shake.

Pinako laid the towel over the bed. It was likely this would be the last night the thin straw mattress ever saw, and she was at least going to save the bedding.

"He's just so big," Winry said, voice barely audible. When Alphonse made it into the lavatory Winry leaned forward to peer into the doorway, but inside Alphonse's body served as a grey wall. "All four of us can barely even fit in here!"

This was the truth. The back guest bedroom never saw guests, and it had slowly evolved into both a pantry and shed. It was the store room, the junk room, the room for holiday decorations, sewing projects, extra furniture, and broken furniture. Quickly Winry was making what extra space she could. She shoved a barrel of flower flush to the wall, stacked the metal gardening buckets on top, and crammed the female sewing mannequin they used for their dresses into the corner where a collection of wooden garden stakes, and fine automail cleaning dowels were left.

One of the garden stakes refused to stay and Winry was kicking it irritably when she was overcome with a thought and stopped. Stiff with recollection she spun towards Pinako and said, "I left the front door open!"

Winry remembered now, that twenty minutes ago when Alphonse arrived shouldering his way through the front door as if it were a concrete wall, she had not shut the door behind him. Instead, she had backed up in a daze of fright, grabbing at her open mouth in shock, and screaming with no conscious understanding that she was. "I!" Winry cried, looking too overwhelmed to be thinking right. "I didn't shut it! The front door is open!" And it was, it's old hinges hanging on tight as it flapped about in the wind and pouring rain.

"What?" Pinako sputtered, with flabbergasted shock. As far as Pinako was concerned, that went last on the list. "Who cares Winry!" She wadded up the bottom sheet she had previously stripped off the bed. "Leave it be."

"Shouldn't I close it!" Winry cried.

Pinako looked to her eleven year old niece with confusion, before fixing Winry in a tight and powerful glare. If Winry's mind was jumping to tasks outside of the close walls of the room in order to escape them, she had another thing coming. "You stay in this room," Pinako said, lowering her voice to something mean. "I need you in the room to help me." Winry was horrified with these words. The girl was scared and clutched the sheets she held with confusion. "You understand?" Pinako asked. It was possible Winry might run. She might run voluntarily, or she might suddenly let loose in panic and flee. Then what? Then where would they be? With one suit of unstable armor and one half dead rat.

Winry hugged the bed sheets to herself. Lifting them up to her chin she began shaking her head senselessly while crying out a string of unintelligible words. She was terrified, as any child would be, as _anyone _would be. Alphonse hadn't just come alone. No, and he hadn't just come in the armor. He had come in like a monster, and in his arms like a sick gift, was his half dead brother, falling apart at the seams and leaking all over the entry mat.

"Stay in here!" Pinako said firmly, adding the bottom sheet to Winry's arms.

Alphonse returned to the lavatory doorway and began trying to exit. He held Ed in his arms, elbows cocked back, and he couldn't fit through. He walked smack into the doorframe, and Winry scrambled aside with wide eyes as if the armor would come with perpetual motion and run them flat.

Pinako looked at the armor's arms. They were massive metal cylinders with hands and shoulder sockets. Inside them Ed's scrawny eleven year old body was naked save for a towel. Somehow in blind panic Pinako still remembered she didn't want her niece involved in procedures with nude male subjects, and that was the truth of it. It had nothing to do with Edward's modesty. It had only to do with the fact she had decided Winry could wait a few more years before crossing that bridge. So before dunking Ed into the tub, Pinako had knotted a hand towel tightly about his waist so it wouldn't move.

This made Ed look like a peasant, and his body looked raw and uncooked against the metal pan of Alphonse's strong and ruthless body. Like a car trying to go through a wall, Alphonse was reversing, pivoting, and hammering himself into the doorframe, and the sound of him was a wooden spoon being swung repeatedly into a large steel kettle.

Pinako swallowed the thick lump forming in her throat as she watched this. Although she knew the only variable to give was the wall, she couldn't bring herself to speak. Not even to scold Alphonse. It was just downright frightening, and she felt a rush of fear bloom when she considered that Alphonse could apply that strength to Edward's body.

Suddenly Ed was not in the safety of an embrace, he was in danger. Alphonse's metal arms were a mouse trap capable of crushing down on Ed's torso with strength enough to burst the pulp from his organs and snap the string of his spine. As a delicate bag of flesh, Ed was being held by something of immense impermeable strength that couldn't even sense its arms were full. Pinako was willing to bet Alphonse could pop Ed's head off the thread of his neck, and cross the room before noticing it had rolled out of his arms and sat on the floor behind him.

The lavatory doorframe surrendered on the right hand side, and Alphonse entered the guest bedroom. The oak molding flecked outward like old paint and shot the finishing nails upward like porcupine quills. Alphonse didn't notice this. He tromped forward, with speed they didn't know he could use, and thrust his arms out.

"Here granny!" Alphonse said. The pitch of his voice was hysterical. It was desperate, and Pinako had to believe Alphonse was actually sobbing inside the armor, and perhaps had been sobbing since he'd arrived. It was possible he began the senseless banshee wailing they heard approaching the house in Trisha's basement, where he woke up as he was, with Ed barely conscious and bleeding profusely. In a dark dirt floor room, he watched hands he couldn't feel pick up Ed's body, and screaming, left the place running.

"I got him!" Alphonse cried. "Here, take him!"

Ed was nothing but a noodle hanging in Alphonse's massive paws. Alphonse did not have enough life experience to know how to hold a person, and carried Ed the way you would a wooden toy. This left Ed's head hanging off Alphonse's wrist flopping about with no support, and his single flesh arm dangling down between Alphonse's hands like a skin colored tail. The missing limbs were stumps of drenched blood-saturated rags, and the smell was incredible.

Pinako had butchered animals before, and she'd never witnessed such a repulsive ground meat stench. In the tiny room it was gag inducing. If she were to slaughter a goat, slitting the soup of its stomach open and dropping its entrails like ropes between her gardening buckets, sewing mannequin, and tiny twin bed, she felt certain the mutilated human smell from Ed would have dominated.

The Elric boys smelled like death. In the dark storming night, with the rain pouring down, and the wind howling, there was something eerie about them, as if you could catch it the way you could a plague.

There weren't many times in Pinako's life that she was speechless, but this was one of them. With the steady hand of a surreal participant she pointed to the mattress and in a calm controlled voice said, "Just put him on the bed Alphonse."

Alphonse's metal head tipped downward, and Winry took a quick step back. They didn't know he could look down, and in one forward stomp Alphonse approached the bed, bent, and uncurled his arms as if releasing a hatch.

Ed jostled badly in the drop and Alphonse returned to familiar high-pitched whining. He knew things weren't going well, but as a child, didn't know how to do them better. He hadn't cared for Ed's wounds, he was scared of them, and left his basement with Ed as he was, looking for an adult.

In the Rockbell foyer, Pinako had been able to grab Ed's shredded shoulder socket and protruding Acromion bone with her bare hand. He looked like an ocean-less shark victim. Suddenly the leg was bitten in two, the arm was gobbled, and he had flopped to the ground without the mercy of water to drown in. He was bleeding out, and it was everywhere: trailing behind the armor, smearing onto its metal shell, and soaking into Ed's clothes so his simple tee shirt looked as if someone had dipped him in red paint.

Ed was mentally incoherent when he arrived. Aside from the seizure like twitching caused by the nerves firing in his brain, had lay like a corpse when Pinako ripped the cooking apron off herself and used it as a tourniquet for his leg before carrying him further inside with Den barking madly.

"Granny, nii-san doesn't look so good!" Alphonse said, pulling his arms out from under Ed's body and letting Ed fall to the mattress. The act was so unintentionally careless Winry flinched and broke into tears.

With Trisha's death Ed lost his appetite, and weight started falling off him so fast Pinako had become seriously worried. She became desperate to keep him eating. She made pies with lard based crusts, and pastries with heavy amounts of butter. If he didn't clear his dinner plate she still gave him dessert, and as much as he would take. She was scared with how thin Ed's arms and legs were getting, but Ed wasn't. He was depressed, as was Alphonse, and both of them handled it differently. The lack of appetite was just one of the many ways it was born in Ed, but it had a lasting effect. His had grown scrawny on top of being short, and now with pieces missing in addition, it was hard to understand how his heart kept beating.

"You're going to help him, right!" Alphonse asked, sounding hysterical. His little voice echoed upward as if it were trapped down by his feet. "Right granny! Right!" Alphonse turned towards Pinako with his catcher's mitt hands reaching forward like a beggar.

"Don't be thick boy," Pinako said, stepping cautiously to the bed. Alphonse felt like a looming predator over his injured cub. She didn't want to make him nervous so he tried to intervene. She believed the strength of his arm and hand coming too quickly could render her unconscious, or break her jaw, so she was careful.

Ed's dripping hair was plastered to his skull, and it made him look as if he'd been pulled from a river. _Boating accident, the motor chewed him up_. Pinako began untying the towel on his waist. It was now a soaked rag of pink blood water and she needed to replace it. "You couldn't dry him?" she asked, glancing up to Alphonse.

"I tried, but I think I hurt him! He made noise!"

Pinako was shocked. "He made noise!" she repeated with alarm. She turned to Winry. "Winry, get me new bandages, and Alphonse, grab me fresh towels!"

Winry ran from the room, and Alphonse clattered back into the lavatory, slamming his shoulders in and out as he went. Pinako uprooted Ed's pink blood-stained towel and dried him with the one Alphonse brought her. Placing bleeding patients in the tub was never her first decision, but she was so overcome with Ed, she felt she couldn't see the wounds clearly. He was so blood drenched she needed it off. The smell of him, and the way it was lubricating him was difficult.

Gently Pinako squeezed the towel to Ed's roots, and with her hands on either side of his skull, he flinched unexpectedly.

Pinako froze with dread filled surprise. She dropped her gaze to Ed's face, but it was slack. _Lord in Heaven,_ she thought. Ed's fingers were twitching. _…he's trying to come around._

"Winry! Hurry it up!" Pinako yelled, unraveling the towel from Ed's head and dumping it over his waist. Winry came running back into the bedroom, her flip flops slapping loudly on the wet floor boards. She had her arms loaded with provisions and she collided directly into the side of the bed and dropped them alongside Ed's body.

Den came in after her, following with a hurried impatient pace, head raised, and tail flapping with animation.

"Get that dog, out of here!" Pinako snapped.

"Den, go!" Winry screamed, pointing to the door, in a panic.

Pinako reached over Ed's hungry looking stomach and grabbed at supplies. Winry was good, and didn't just carry back bandages. She turned her tiny arms into a one-stop medical kit, depositing small plastic containers of medications, and tools, among a small portable tank of oxygen. Pinako smiled wryly when she saw it, and she gave Winry a glance of pride, but the girl was busy wiggling into rubber gloves. With her bottom lip trembling, and occasional tears slipping down her cheeks, Winry fit herself with latex gloves and began opening bandages.

"What do," Winry asked, voice trembling, "what do you want me to start with?"

"We need to get him stable, then we'll figure out what to do with him," Pinako said, unraveling Ed's leg. Both limbs had been wrapped in poorly crafted temporary pressure bandages. "Get some oxygen on him."

Winry grabbed the tank and moved it up towards the headboard. She had months of training grooming her for automail surgery and patient care, but working in a cheerful dress with glittering nail polish she looked drastically under qualified. It seemed laughable to find a eleven-year-old fumbling about medical supplies, but this was a façade. Winry was a strong second pair of hands, a partner Pinako had incorporated into all aspects of her routine. There was not one thing she did, that Winry did not at least help with, and Pinako believed this was how you truly learned: on your feet, in the moment, and in the blood.

Winry assembled the oxygen correctly and gently slid a mask over Ed's face with care. "There Ed," Winry whispered, stepping back and clutching her hands to her chest. She checked everything twice, even while sniffling, before staggering her way down the bed and looking to Pinako for directions.

Pinako opened the bandages on Ed's leg and studied the wound. Ed looked like an open piece of veal, and she felt her gag reflex working with the sight and smell of it. This was very different from a controlled surgery, and Pinako lifted her gaze to Winry and considered the girl. As the odor became worse and the damage more apparent, she was weary Winry would faint. Her niece was white as a sheet and shaking, with glassy eyes fixed on Ed's severed leg.

There was much of Pinako that wanted to free Winry from the room, but there was another part that didn't want to be alone. If this was Edward's last night, she had to know she tried, that they tried, and didn't back away from anything. Without two people, and even with two people, he might still slip away.

"I need you to do the leg," Pinako said softly. She had felt the arm with her palm, and knew it was worse. "You can do it." She believed this. Winry was capable. "Bandage it closed."

Without words Winry stumbled forward with her mouth twitching and her throat constricting with sickness. She grabbed a handful of thick absorbent bandages and began quickly, with fortitude. It was the conviction of a true mechanic, of greatness, and Pinako knew, as she watched Winry aid the amputation of her childhood friend while physically deteriorating into silent choked sobbing, that Winry would carry on the Rockbell name onward and probably even surpass her.

Pinako moved up to Ed's missing arm and began opening the bandages when Ed whipped his head to the side. His breathing was becoming fast and sporadic causing his chest to jump wildly as if he were running. He was trying to breach consciousness and Pinako worked as fast as she could. She snapped gloves on, ripped bandages off, and emptied disinfectant over the visible socket. There was no use trying to sugar coat things, she was terrified of what he would do conscious.

The water had cleaned away the smeared blood, so when the bandages dropped, it was easy to see what parts were entirely broken, and what seemed to be squirting juices to activate the arm his body wanted to keep.

In the bag that was Ed's skin, the flesh that had torn until it snapped hung uselessly about the opened inside of him like string cheese. His shoulder looked like ground beef sagging around a white crowning bone. A few of his tendons were dangling out like wires, and much of the socket still seemed to be pulsing in response to his nerve signals.

Careful of the tendons she didn't know what she would do with yet, Pinako began wrapping his skin tightly, the way you would the limb of a mummy. On her third pass, Ed gave his head another quick shake, and his flesh arm slid away from his body.

"He's trying to come around," Pinako said, warning them, but the children became excited.

"He's going to wake up!" Alphonse cheered, sounding overcome with hopeful relief.

"I don't want him to yet!" Pinako said, struggling to keep her speed. Winry was trying to match it, and it was easier for the girl because Ed's leg could be pivoted and lifted. The shoulder was attached to Ed's torso, and it made things complicated. Pinako knew it would make the injury awful for him.

"Not yet," Pinako whispered, softly to herself. In his body her fingers were masterfully building a cocoon of bandages with thirty years of skill. "Not yet, you little Bean."

Ed's wounds were not yet an hour old, and had secured no clocked medical treatment. The time Ed had spent on the dirt floor of his basement bleeding, in Alphonse's metal arms in the rain, in Pinako's foyer where the armor shoved in the door with Winry screaming, and Pinako cocking her shotgun, meant nothing. The time Ed had spent in bandages, with actual antibiotics was nonexistent.

Before everything started, they were in the kitchen. Winry was sewing while Pinako washed the dinner dishes. They thought Alphonse was the wind, or a wounded animal. Before he reached the house they heard him approaching, and Winry ran to the window with curiosity. When you lived in the country the outdoors became part of you. Winry opened the unlocked door to the rain storm unafraid of the open dark space. She was used to living in the sweet-smelling fields that stretched on forever and at night became black ink blotted outlines of land and sky.

Pinako had suspected nothing more than a maimed possum, but in their doorway was a towering suit of armor framed by a lightning storm. Holding Ed's mangled body it looked like a monster, and Winry ran from it screaming in fear.

In hindsight, Pinako realized she wasn't sure what was at the door when she went for the gun. With Winry screaming that way, she didn't need to see it, she only felt the need to shoot it.

In their foyer Alphonse dropped to his knees on the entry mat soaking up Ed's raining blood. He was begging them to help and cradling Ed like a stillborn. There was a time, as this happened, that Pinako was certain she didn't know what was going on, or what was going to happen. From the back room Den was barking viciously, and clutching her head in hysterics Winry had backed into the wall stiff with horror.

It wasn't until Pinako had Alphonse's metal head behind the front sight of her shotgun that Winry somehow recognized his voice. She silenced, and it was her abrupt composure that stopped Pinako from pulling the trigger.

With eyes painfully wide Winry stared up at the armor, shaking as if with seizure, and muttered a small soft, "Alphonse?" before fainting into a heap on the floor.

Alphonse lumbered past Winry as if he didn't see her. In a kneeling crawl he groveled his way to Pinako crying harder than she'd ever heard someone cry. She dropped the gun and slipped to her rear with his advance. The thumping of his knees into the floorboards was a Big Bass drum, and Ed was so slick with blood he was trying to slide out of the armor's arms.

When Alphonse made it to Pinako, he dropped Ed directly into her lap. He deposited Ed by opening his arms and letting the boy go, and because Ed was a child and she was a woman, she naturally closed her arms around him. In a moment that wasn't more than human instinct, she took to him, and held him.

She remembered thinking, in an absent emotionless way, that Trisha's eldest boy was dead. That something had attacked him, and she tucked Ed's head to her neck and pressed her face into his wet hair with abject sadness. _He was only eleven, and what a cruel fate and struggle he had owned to reach it. _Then she felt a hint, just the smallest hint, of body heat beneath the ice of the rain and blood. Instead of the shameless cold of death, turning his fingers into rubbery grubs, and his lips into blue streaks, there was something very similar to a small perseverant flame inside him. He was trying to keep himself warm. With his body cut open, smeared with dirt, wet with rain, and leaking so fast he was all but gone…there was still enough basic function working to try and keep him warm.

Pinako had curled her arms about Ed the way she had her infant son. The way she had done with Winry when the girl was born, when Ed was born, and when Alphonse was born. Breaking into a chest rattling cry she staggered to her feet, the armor completely forgotten, and ran to the bathroom with him. _She tried to save him._

She plunged four needles into Ed's thigh while ripping bandages open with her teeth. Using a powder designed for automail surgery she dumped it over his wounds. It hit like baking flour, but instantly stopped the bleeding. Then she wrapped him quickly, temporarily, and filled the tub.

The armor crawled after her, but was too weak with hysterics, even in that body, to participate. She tied Ed's waist in a towel, tucked another behind his head, and left him in a few inches of warm water, before running back to Winry. She needed the girl to help. If this was going to work, she was going to need two pairs of hands.

Nearly twenty-five minutes later Ed was turning his head from side to side with his breathing labored and wheezed where he lay in the guest bed. His face was a torrent of emotion, twisting together as if he were trying to sneeze. His right eye opened a sliver, facing Pinako, and for a moment the gold color of his iris, like the glowing sun of his life energy, was visible. Then his eyes rolled back and they bulged like white mushrooms.

"He's breathing really fast, but he's breathing okay!" Winry cried, hugging the severed stump of Ed's leg to tighten the bandages before she tapped them down. "Alphonse he's breathing okay!" Winry cheered.

"Thank you!" Alphonse said, still crying. "Just please help him!" He stepped aside, trying to give them more room, but his head knocked the sole hanging light bulb in the guest bedroom. It went swinging illuminating Ed's pale face and bleeding body in a blinking light.

"How's the leg doing?" Pinako asked, sealing her own bandages. She looked down to Winry for an assessment, and Winry was examining her work with critical concern. If they were able to stop things from bleeding long enough to let him clot up, there was a chance.

"He's bleeding too much by me. I've got him layered but it's not enough!" Winry said, with panic. "We need to get an IV on him, this is taking too long!" She couldn't be more right.

"Dust the bandages with some of our powder," Pinako ordered, pointing to the door. They did not have miscellaneous medical equipment and supplies sitting all over the house. It was politely kept and organized in their Post Surgical, and Surgical room. Although her business was also her home, her home did not have to look like a business, and Pinako took this seriously.

Winry looked startled with this order and hesitated. The powder wasn't good for Ed's wounds, it stopped bleeding but slowed healing.

"Don't stand there gawking at me girl!" Pinako snapped. "Go!

Winry left the bed in a full speed run, and Alphonse backed away from her the way you backed from a harmless bug a fraction of your size simply because it was moving. His head hit the light bulb again and the blinking was too much. Pinako felt it as dramatically as a siren going on and off. The strobe effect was sickening.

"Alphonse! Can't ya stand still!"

"I am sorry!" Alphonse cried, trying to stop the bulb with his massive hands.

"Don't touch it boy! You'll probably break it!" Pinako yelled, moving to Ed's leg and unwrapping Winry's bandages. Winry had used their own design of pressure materials and wraps, and the dressing was impressive. If Ed's leg had been manually removed, or even the result of a farming accident, the bandages would have been enough…but this was something different. This was something nefarious, as if a living thing had gobbled up Ed's leg, gnawing and licking, and enjoying the taste. The wound had damage as if the leg were bitten and held while something whipped its head back and forth, tearing through, and jerking Ed's body around like a meat doll until it got what it wanted.

The fresh smell of raw injury and blood again wafted into the room when Pinako peeled everything back off, and she was glad Alphonse couldn't smell it. Ed's stink was powerful. It turned the room because he had two open wounds instead of one, and those wounds were large in size. You only needed one sniff to sense the danger level. To believe that something was mutilated and leaking in a way that may not be saved. Ed's age made this throat clenching. He was not a controlled surgery. This was not an amputation. He was dying, right now, as surely as he was alive he was dying, and they were interrupting that process and stopping it.

Alphonse would have been sick. Pinako was used to the smell of human and so was Winry. Their experience made this manageable, because they recognized the natural odor of open tissue somewhere inside the unnatural wet and potent stench consuming Ed. It was a foreign vicious agent, and without any evidence, Pinako was certain this smell was the only trace left of the culprit who had done this to him.

"We're going to have to take him in," Pinako said softly, speaking to herself. "Instate him and everything," she said, feeling the reality of this settling over her.

She was not talking about taking Ed into her home, that had already been done. Hohenheim had left, and Trisha had died. It was a quick death, but even with a quick death there was time, and Trisha understood her body was giving out and she was leaving her children behind. Pinako had known Trisha for almost two decades. She saw the house go up, the garden go in, and they were neighbors. They shared recipes, swapped sewing and co-owned farming supplies. Soon Trisha was pregnant, and Pinako helped with the birth. Then Trisha was pregnant again, and Pinako again helped with the birth. Edward was only one year the night Alphonse was born, and Ed cried through the entire thing. He could sense the unrest in the house with the adults moving about, and the doctor coming and going. Hohenheim had been worried, and lapsed into a silent vigil of his wife. Alphonse's birth was hard and long on Trisha, and lasted many hours.

When it was all over Pinako carried Ed to Trisha. She was in bed barely awake, and holding her newborn. Smiling faintly, Trisha took Ed in the other arm and Ed stopped crying as soon as his mother held him. The moment where the two Elric brothers met was one of Pinako's favorite baby shower stories. Dazed from hours of crying, Ed took one indifferent look at Alphonse's bundled infant self, and pushed the boy aside to rest more comfortably. Pinako had laughed good and hard.

Trisha cherished her children. Her love went out to the boys, and so when she was near death, with her body losing color, and her mind starting to wander, she had clung to Pinako's hand, in desperation, and in heartbreaking sadness and whispered, "Take care of them, won't you? My boys."

Trisha slipped away in her sleep, with Edward and Alphonse sitting alongside her in bed reading to each other. They didn't notice when the soft sound of Trisha's breath stopped, and as children, they didn't notice Trisha's slight but significant change in temperature. Pinako only knew she left the boys in bed with Trisha resting, went out to weed the Elric garden, and when she came back, Trisha had passed.

Keeping herself composed Pinako took both boys by the hand and led them to the hall before closing Trisha's bedroom door. Then she knelt, with them waiting patiently, and Alphonse still holding his book of rhymes and said, "Boys, listen to me carefully." It had taken all of her strength. "Your mother is sleeping now, and this time, she is not going to wake up."

They understood this, as much as children could, and started to cry. They cried for days, and weeks. They moved out of their house and into the Rockbells. She took care of them the way she had promised Trisha she would. She kept them clean, fed them, tucked them in at night, and made sure they kept their studies. So it was now not a question of taking Ed into her home, because that had been done. Rather, it was taking him into rehabilitation. This was not the flu. This was not chickenpox, or a spring cold. She could not simply insist he wear more sweaters, give him two tablespoons of something, or apply medicated ointment. He was injured in a life-threatening and life-changing way, and she did not think she could appropriately care for him without the proper resources and routines.

Standing alongside her guest bed thinking, Pinako realized if they were in any other profession, she would be running to the next farm, borrowing the wagon, and loading the children in so they could get to a doctor. She understood that Resembool's clinic wouldn't be enough. That Ed would be sent via train to Central, for better initial care, before being transferred back. He was not just a sick boy, he was now severely handicapped, and to an extent where he would not be able to care for himself for some time.

Pinako looked up at Alphonse, her expression strained with the weight of it all, and her gray hair springing free of her tie in frizzy bouncy coils about her face. She considered him as she tried to get her mind straight. There were two big things happening tonight, and while the first was Ed being instated into rehabilitation, the second was the suit of armor they were inheriting.

"Alphonse," Pinako said, voice soft, as if waking from a dream. "Are you…okay in there?" she asked. Since Alphonse had not been the one bleeding to death, she had barely even looked at him. Now she thought about what could be inside the armor, and was scared to even ask. "Are…you hurt at all?" she asked. She didn't think he was actually wearing it but, in understanding he might not be, she didn't know what to think.

Alphonse moved slightly with her question. His body shifted, as if he were utterly stunned, and then he answered in a soft frail tone, "Yeah…I am okay I guess."

"You sure?" Pinako asked. She didn't know how the hell he could be.

"Yeah," Alphonse said, giving a few nods. "Yeah I don't…really…feel much at all." He sounded surprised, as if he also hadn't given his state of existence much thought. "Isn't that funny?" he asked, sounding terrified. He lifted his hands slowly and looked down at them. "I am in the armor."

Winry came back looking as if a box of baking soda had exploded around her. Sniffling she walked quickly to Pinako and extended the prepared bandages and explained simply with, "I dropped the powder."

Pinako didn't comment. She took the bandages and applied them gently to Ed's open wounds and Winry began wrapping the dressing back together. They both knew this would stop the bleeding and that was important.

"Winry, we're going to move Ed into Post Surgical and instate him," Pinako said, watching Winry tightly seal Ed's leg. Winry's hands slowed for a moment, but in a way it seemed that Winry not only agreed, but almost expected this, and she gave a soft understanding nod. "As soon as his leg is done we'll move him and get him set up."

"Okay," Winry said, before looking up when Ed moaned a soft sound. It was miserable, and deeply set in his throat. Pinako recognized it. It was one of Ed's disagreeing groans of reluctant compliance, and it meant only one thing: He did not like his situation. The last time she had heard it, his mud speckled self was refusing to take a bath, and she had promised he would regret disobeying her. _Edward, you march that thin self of yours up to the tub before I wear it thin enough to see through! _

Winry leapt with hope when Ed made noise. "Granny!" Winry cried, moving up to the headboard. Alphonse also stepped closer and spoke to Ed. "Ed, can you hear us!"

"Nii-san, are you waking up!"

Pinako nipped this in the bed. "Stop it!" she snapped, startling both children. "Don't talk to him, I don't want him waking up," she said firmly, before turning to Alphonse. "Now Alphonse, come here," she said, beckoning Alphonse to her before looking to Winry and pointing to the door. "Grab me a kit from the first Post Surgical bed," she said, and Winry left running for it. The thought of feeding her adopted nephew into their post automail surgery procedure was starting to make Pinako ill, and she felt the bitter sarcasm she wielded only after a few drinks rising within her. "Alphonse, I need to fit your brother with two very important things, a IV and a catheter, and you might have to help me," she said. She couldn't have Winry helping to keep Ed still. Even more disturbing than her niece working on an adult male penis, was her niece working on that of a young boy. Alphonse squeaked a small sound of alarm and held his hands to his breast-plate as if in panic. "Good," she said, as if this response were favorable. She was going to pretend it was to keep herself sane.

Ed suddenly came to enough to recognize her voice, and in a low rasped tone, he called to her. "Granny?" Ed was almost too quiet to hear. "Mom?"

Alphonse rushed to Ed's side when he spoke. "Nii-san!" Alphonse cheered.

"Dammit Alphonse!"Pinako said. "Don't talk to him!"

Alphonse didn't even hear this. He was so thrilled with Ed's return to consciousness, and life, Pinako went unnoticed. "Nii-san, it's okay! You're going to be okay! You're not going to die after all!"

Winry returned carrying a sealed white plastic bag of sterile goods, and stopped dead on sight of Alphonse talking to Ed. Standing in her damp blood splattered summer dress her expression went stoic before she realized Ed was awake, and then she ran to his side.

Pianko snatched the bag from Winry's arms and opened it, while talking to the girl. "Winry, don't speak to him. Don't do anything to help him wake up!"

"Ed's waking up?" Winry asked, voice a soft disbelieving whisper. She leaned forward to better see Ed's face and Alphonse's massive metal arm brushed her shoulder. Immediately she recoiled as if Alphonse was hot, and squeaked a sound of alarm.

Alphonse didn't feel the touch, and he didn't so much as notice Winry's response. He reached to Ed and tried to touch the boy. His massive hand was big enough to close around Ed's head and crush it. Carefully with just one finger, Alphonse nudged Ed's chest a bit, before tapping at the oxygen mask on Ed's face while talking. This was enough to cause Ed's eyes to flutter open, bloodshot and swollen.

Ed returned to a world of light so bright he could barely see, and pain that took him completely. Alphonse's voice was somewhere in the mix, and Ed whispered a brief, "Alphonse?" before beginning the quick shallow breathing of someone in severe pain. Pinako began cursing under her breath with Ed whining Alphonse's name and blinking his eyes as if blind.

Pinako pushed past Winry and took ownership of the bed. Ed was moving his flesh hand in frantic grabbing motions as if looking for something he'd lost, and Pinako took it in a tight loving grasp. "Ed? Can you hear me?" she asked, speaking slow and calm.

Ed was becoming aware of their voices. He turned his head to Pinako, and his eyes were struggling to find her. They were squinting tightly as if he were fighting to see in a dark room. "Granny?" Ed said, continuing to escalate. "Granny!" Ed's eyes came to fix on Pinako. Swollen from his tears, they looked hot as if stung by bees.

"Quiet now," Pinako said softly. "Lay still Ed." Gently Pinako replaced Ed's hand at his side. He was beginning to shake as if his body were malfunctioning, and she had to believe on some level that was true. As it checked off its systems it was going to note a serious change in mass, and that many circuits were no longer responding.

"My…" Ed said softly before breaking into an ongoing shutter with the letter M. "M-m-m-m-m." Ed closed his eyes struggling. He abandoned speech for a good ten seconds with his expression dissolving into an exaggerated wince before crying a soft and clear, "Ow." He inhaled deeply and opened his eyes again. He began crying universal complaints of pain and Pinako couldn't be sure how coherent he was. She was hoping barely at all.

"You'll be all right," Pinako said kindly. "You're going to be okay Ed, we've given you some medicine." This was true. She had given him antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxers, and as much pain medication as she dared. "Now you need to lay still Ed. I have to finish taking care of you, you're in bad shape." Ed's hand moved to his face and rubbed it before shoving his oxygen mask off so he could cover his mouth when he began whining. He had no composure, and was worse than Pinako had ever seen him. He was whining like a violin, in high-pitched, wobbling notes that would have ashamed him. He sounded like a small wounded animal, and Pinako thought of a lamb, born too soon, or hit by farming equipment. Looking terrified he was trying to curl himself together but only had two limbs left and a body in such agony it wouldn't participate.

"Ed, stay laying still," Pinako said, assembling the equipment she wanted. "You're not wearing anything under your towel." Ed wasn't hearing her. He arched his back and attempted to roll to the side. With his single hand covering his face he started bawling.

If this had been any other patient, Winry would have immediately intervened to keep them complacent, but instead she looked stricken with shock. She was clutching her fresh glove covered hands to her chest. Her tiny face looked drained to the core, as if she'd been sick, sick for weeks, and was now struggling to even stand. Pinako had to stop her work to correct Ed's position, towel, and oxygen mask, and she gave Winry a sharp look.

"Winry!"Pinako snapped, starling the girl. Winry was frozen in place watching Ed's unrecognizable suffering. "I need your help." Winry's eyes widened. "You understand, I need it!"

Winry began shaking her head irrationally. "No way, I can't!" she cried, covering her ears with her hands. Winry was horrified by the suggestion she apply her medical studies to the boy she was currently crushing on. The love triangle between Pinako's niece and, what Pinako comically referred to as, her adopted nephews, moved from week to week. Which one she loved more, and which one paid most attention to her. For some sick reason the boys were part of this, and there seemed to be a mutual understanding of competition and prize for Winry's flippant attention. Since the boys had left on their training Ed had written Winry a few mushy letters, and the girl had promoted him over Alphonse for the third time that month.

"I can't do this to Ed!" Winry cried, squeezing her eyes tight. In her mind she couldn't insert Ed into her automail training and routines! It was unthinkable! She couldn't do those things to him! Ed was not a patient, he was Ed! She couldn't help dress him, or feed him, or bathe him! Her mind went to a blank space. _She couldn't do it!_

Winry began backing slowly from the bed. "Don't make me!" she begged, breaking into tears. "Don't make me, I can't!"

Pinako slapped her hand down on Ed's mattress and snarled out, "Don't be stupid girl, you know better than that!" Winry was crying. "When those you love are hurt, you help them! Do you want him in pain like this?" Pinako thrust a hand out to Ed who was floating near consciousness, and coming to understand they were yelling. "My god, look at him! Are you really going to deny him care!"

"I am not trying to!" Winry wailed.

"This is not the Rockbell way Winry," Pinako scolded harshly. "I taught you better than that, and who else is supposed to help me!" She pointed to Alphonse, the boy she didn't want touching her light bulbs, the boy who had just ripped up their bathroom doorway. "Really!" she asked angrily. "Really, Winry!"

Ed dragged his hand off his face and looked at Pinako. His vision was fuzzy but suddenly he understood the old woman was there and Winry was nearby crying. "Where," Ed muttered, voice soft and raspy. "I am?...I am dead," Ed said, reaching a conclusion. Heads turned. "I…" Everyone silenced, and Pinako stared at Ed with wide-eyed shock. "This is decomposition?" Ed asked, slurring his words with the medication in his system. His eyes drifted upward, towards the light bulb. "I thought…it would…hurt more." Ed was breathing heavily into his oxygen mask and Pinako stared at the boy. _She couldn't believe what she was seeing._

"Ed, I am going to get you settled and put you under," Pinako said. Ed swallowed repeatedly while staring at the light in a disoriented consciousness. "Winry! Since you're not going to help me, you're going to make Alphonse do it!" Pinako yelled accusingly, trying to guilt the girl into usefulness. She gave Winry a disapproving look while unpacking the small sterile kit. Winry only cried harder, shaking her head and covering her face. "He's inexperienced! You have practice!" she yelled, attaching tubes for an IV and sitting down on the bed. "He's not qualified, you're a trained professional!"

"I didn't know those people! I can't do it!" Winry cried. Pinako completed unraveling the IV packaging and set it aside before grabbing the blue sterile wrapping of a catheter and Winry lost it.

"No granny! I can't do this to him!" Winry cried, beginning to hop in place with her panic. Pinako beckoned Alphonse closer. The first order of instating the boy was getting him care their hired Rockbell services would have provided, and the guest bedroom was going to have to serve.

Alphonse leaned closer to Ed, eager to comfort him, and set his weight onto the mattress the way you might kneel on the edge of a bed. It was a harmless common action, but Alphonse's weight created a pivot point, and tipped the mattress almost completely vertical.

Ed cried out in fright with the sudden lifting sensation, and slid down the angled bed and into Alphonse's metal thigh. Pinako was tossed to the floor, and Winry broke out screaming.

Alphonse jumped back from the bed, tossing his body away with sharp momentum he couldn't control. In giant lumbering steps he tromped backwards with Winry running to the other side of the room, until he hit the wall. To his right a small framed picture of Winry's first embroidery, a tiny lamb standing next to a flower, fell to the floor and smashed.

The mattress, with the removal of Alphonse's weight, fell back and flopped into the bed frame with Ed still on top of it looking absolutely horrified.

Ed didn't understand what just happened, and broke a few terrified screams, with his eyes fully open and staring up at the light bulb in such a way Pinako would have worried about his sight if she had time to worry about anything so inconsequential when whole limbs were missing.

For Ed, the world of intense bright light had flipped over on itself, and he wasn't sure where he was, who was with him, or what was going on. His body was in agony, and he broke out crying for help, voice full of desperation. He screamed for Alphonse, repeatedly.

"Grandma! You're scaring him!" Alphonse said, rushing back to the bed and laying his huge hand on Ed's chest. Pinako pushed herself up as fast as she was able. Something about how easily Alphonse had punctured their safety had her rattled to her core. "I am right here nii-san." Alphonse's palm flattened Ed's chest, and Ed silenced when the air was evacuated from his lungs, and began hacking for it. Alphonse ripped his hand back startled. To him the strength he had applied was normal, and he had sensed no part of Ed being injured. The only thing he understood was resistance under his palm, but this wasn't the case. He was flattening his brother, and his eyes saw this happening!

"Look what I did!"Alphonse cried, sounding devastated. "I am sorry!"

Pinako was horrified with how quickly chaos had reared its head and taken over. She felt the need to run from it, and began wrapping the towel over the bed onto Ed. "Winry this room is no good!" she said. "I am moving him to post surgical now!" She had thought, for a moment, something as quaint as the guest bedroom would suffice, and now she felt a fool. She kept everything for rehabilitation in one spot for a reason, and that reason was: it just didn't work strewn about in an unorganized fashion. Ed needed medical care, and he belonged where it was given. "Now!"Pinako snapped. "I mean right now!"

Winry responded to this with a single step towards the door. Her face was taut with stress and white as china.

Pinako tucked the towel up about Ed's body the way she would an infant and lifted him carefully into her arms. He was delusional, albeit awake in some fashion. He groaned once before breaking a quick sob, but otherwise, hung motionless in her arms. He weighed far too little without his limbs, and curled together as though he registered his damage even while barely conscious.

Pinako carried Ed down the hall to the discrete doorway of Surgical and Post Surgical. You passed it just as you exited the front living room and into the back kitchen. It was a narrow inconspicuous door, and that was how Pinako liked it. As it was they carried their work with them into the house. The sink constantly had automail parts mixing with the dishes, and Winry preferred to study and blend medicines at the kitchen counter and not the table they had dedicated to it in Surgical. It was hard to separate your engineering self from the rest of you, but she did her best, and the small unassuming door in her hall led from her quaint farm house into a white world of sterile expensive equipment.

Surgical was on the right, and Post Surgical was on the left. Surgical was a narrow rectangular room, while Post Surgical was a fat square with two beds, each costing as much as an entire automail surgery. It had taken Pinako years in her career to rival big city care and the innovation of Rush Valley, but she was certainly competitive. With Post Surgical housing two beds, they could have two short-term care, or rehabilitating patients at one time, and this meant a lot when it came to income.

Each bed had its own nightstand, dresser, lavatory, and privacy curtain which was capable of surrounding it. Down to the finest detail the room was constructed to aid and enable automail patients with generous amounts of space for wheelchairs, lifts, trays, and support rails along the walls, near doors, and heavily concentrated along the beds for patients who could get up and down themselves but needed the use of their arms for help. The supplies for each bed cost the worth of five appendages, and each lavatory as much as two automail surgeries.

Pinako went directly to the first bed with Ed in her arms. In the first lavatory doorway it looked as if someone had hurled a bucket of chalk into the ground where Winry dropped their blood clotting powder. The girl's small footprints were visible walking through it several times, and traveled in and out of the room in soft white marks of dust before becoming soggy white smears as she met the wet hallway floor.

Winry ran around Pinako when the old woman nearly crashed into the side of the first bed and lowered Ed into it as carefully as a sleeping infant. "I do too want to help him!" Winry screamed, sounding hysterical. "I am trying!" Ed was squirming with his pain and for the moment didn't know anything. Pinako made an effort to keep his towel on him. "If we're going to instate him I can help!" Winry said, sounding desperate, pleading to be involved when she was the only one removing herself.

"Then do it!" Pinako snapped. She had tucked the plastic bag under her arm and she emptied it into the side of the bed at Ed's side. "We're putting him in as if he was ours! So follow protocol Winry!"These directions gave Winry a familiar outline, and she broke into action.

Alphonse stepped into Post Surgical looking around in a moment of fascination, because the boys had never been allowed through the door. It was always locked, and if the Rockbells had patients visiting, they had to play outside or stay upstairs in their room. If the patient was there for extended stay, as they often were, then they had to be out of sight while the patient was cared for. They never knew what happened inside this room, and they never saw the patients allowed to go into it. Pinako said this was out of respect and privacy to their customers. 'Paying customers don't want a bunch of kids gawking at them while they're in pain,' she had said firmly.

Rockbell Automail prided itself on recognizing a form of patient freedom and patient rights that was not customary for traditional medicine. Even in Rush Valley, the pioneer of automail expansion, after you accepted your mechanic, you were at their mercy. Hospitals and medical staff, when involved, took the orders of your mechanic over your own. This was considered medically sensible, but erased patient right of choice, a concept coined by sparse radical engineers of the new generation, but a concept Pinako had always driven.

The ability for a patient to express views which were given any level of priority was not current practice in Amestris. Medicine was still the historically honored trade it had always been, and patients were to be grateful for their care and recognize their ignorance. While Pinako found this a stuffy and outdated approach, not many agreed with her, and therefore all hospitals and clinics followed the same.

Automail at the turn of the century was the first field beginning to offer differentiating medical rights to patients, and this was largely due to the extreme variation found in both mechanics, and procedure. Not all Automail surgery was the same. Limb surgery was different from that of partial limb, and unlike the remainder of human surgery, which repeated anatomical procedures with a single surgeon conductor, Automail patients were engrossed participants and in many ways their own doctors. The simple traits of age and gender changed things dramatically. A grown man having part of his leg, or a foot replaced, wanted his opinions incorporated into his care, and that was Rockbell reputation. Patient Freedom, and a Restrain-Free setting. These luxuries had cost them, in effort and finance, but Pinako believed in them, and she taught Winry the same.

"Wow, we've never been in here before," Alphonse said, expressionless but sounding a bit mesmerized by the sudden white and cold environment void of country plaid curtains, porcelain chicken decal, and aged family photos that made the Rockbell home warm. Post Surgical was absent of anything which dictated time or gender. It was simply a wooden room, white washed on every wall and cluttered with medical automail equipment.

Alphonse looked slightly uncomfortable as he crept in watching them. Winry had become a focused worker bee, and at lightning speed she had pulled the privacy curtain to split the room, and opened Ed's nightstand. It was freshly packed and waiting for a patient. Everything they needed was inside, and Winry pulled out a blue paper gown and tied it on before sitting a plastic bin of supplies, and box of rubber gloves, on the bed where Ed was crying. He wasn't wailing, or even sobbing, but he was breathing and whining as if in seizure, and Pinako had to believe his trauma was eroding him so efficiently, he couldn't even cry properly.

Winry was putting together an IV at the age of eleven. Her small child fingers were flying over the drip chamber, roller, and tubing, and she hung the fluid bag on the metal pole permanently extending upward from the headboard of Bed One, now to be Edward's, and then moved to Ed's wrist.

Ed wasn't aware someone was touching him, but he was aware he no longer had free use of his arm and yanked it free growing louder.

Winry flinched back, and looked to Pinako who stood at the end of the bed constructing the catheter. "Granny!"Winry said, yelling with an accusatory tone as if Ed wasn't cooperating on purpose. "What are we going to do with him moving like this!" Pinako glanced up for only a second and continued unwrapping the catheter tube with her hands in sterile gloves. "I don't want to restrain him, can't you give him something to calm him down?"

"Give him what?" Pinako snapped. She wasn't aware of when her head began thudding in a migraine of a headache with each heartbeat, but she was becoming increasingly aware of it now.

"Something!"Winry cried, grabbing Ed's wrist and trying to hold it steady so she could disinfect it.

"If I told you the dosages I gave him, even you would scold me Winry." Pinako shook her head before leaning forward and grabbing Ed's flesh ankle. "Edward! You settle down, you hear me!" she said, raising her voice into a strict tone of warning he was familiar with. "Lay yourself still!"

"I need to get Alphonse back! He went into the circle!" Ed cried, shaking his head where he lay. "It ate him! The circle ate him!" Pinako regretting talking to Ed at once. While most of his hysterics came as incoherent noise before, he was now babbling out words and phrases. "She wasn't going to be that way! Mom! I left her there!"

Winry dropped Ed's arm and stepped back in fear, and Pinako felt herself still as well.

"I left her home!" Ed cried. "Mom came! But!"

In the commotion of it all, Pinako realized she never stopped to ask how. _How did Ed become so injured? Why was Alphonse in the armor? Why were the boys in Resembool when she thought they were in Dublith? _

"Alphonse," Pinako said, lowering her voice into a soft but powerful whisper. "Just what the hell were you boys doing before you came here?"

Alphonse squeaked a guilty sound of panic and the metal head began shaking.

Ed was losing his mind. He grabbed his right shoulder bandages with his left arm and started crying loudly. "This is not the—just can't be this way! Don't take my brother!" Pinako could swear she felt her body temperature dropping, and Winry started bawling alongside the bed with Ed suffering so intently.

"_You tried to transmute your mother!_" Pinako snapped, turning accusingly to the armor. Its entire body was rattling, and she didn't know what that meant. "Alphonse! Did you do it! _Did you try to transmute your mother!_" She wasn't a fool to alchemy. She lived next to the Elric boys and had known Hohenheim for years. She knew what human transmutation was, and she knew why it was the taboo that it was. "For god's sake!" she said, feeling the color drain out of her face. "_For god's sake Alphonse_!"

"We're sorry!" Alphonse wailed. He grabbed his metal head and squeezed in such a way Pinako was scared it would crunch inward like a tin can. "We're sorry! We're sorry!"

"Where did you do it!" Pinako yelled. "At the house!" She flung a pointing finger toward the window where the rain was pouring and the lightening coming periodically. "This close to us!" She was terrified something so dangerous was placed right next to her and Winry. It was learning a bomb was set and they were never told. "What in god's name is the matter with you!"

"We're sorry!" Alphonse cried, and his voice was sobbing hysterically in the armor. Coupled with Ed and Winry's crying, Pinako felt the walls closing in on her.

The rest of the world was drifting away, and there was only them, their home, the Elric home, and the storm. Without her mind working her mouth spoke calmly to Winry and Pinako said, "Winry, please go get the Sherry from the kitchen pantry, and bring it to me."

Winry left the room to do so, head tilted back, sobbing loudly.

Pinako went to Ed's bedside and took hold of his spindly arm. She held it flat, rubbed it up and down with a cotton ball dripping with betadine solution and attached the IV. She taped it down firmly, more firmly than she would with an adult, and then pulled the Velcro restraint made for the left hand up onto the bed. Automail surgery was dangerous, with patients who violently flailed limbs which weighted fifty to a hundred pounds, so there were many restraints provided on an automail bed. Though they preferred not to use them, she no longer believed full safety could be obtained without them. She cuffed Ed's arm firmly in place, and then drew a second belt over his chest and forced him snug to the mattress. Ed didn't understand this and for that she was glad. Against her better judgment she filled a needle with something strong, to put him under, and with him crying and speaking nonsense she poked it into the side of his little right cheek and he was out before Winry returned.

Winry walked back into the room, dragging her feet against the floor in misery. She had their dishrag pressed to her face, and was scrubbing it right and left, but dropped it on sight of Ed completely unconscious. "What!" she cried, rushing quickly to the bed with the bottle of Sherry in hand. "What! What! What happened!" Winry gestured to the IV she had been constructing, and then the two restraints before lifting her gaze to Pinako. "Did he become violent granny?"

Pinako snorted with bitter humor. _As if a boy who was not even eighty pounds, and missing an arm and a leg, could become violent._ She pulled the cork on the Sherry and took a swing directly from the bottle. Winry's face contorted with confusion and alarm when this happened.

The Sherry was also known as the Christmas Sherry, or the Easter Sherry, because Pinako didn't drink much. She had when she was younger, and she had when she was starting the business, but now she took care of her niece, and there was no reason to. The party days were over, and this was a new stage of life, a quiet and more focused stage.

Winry was stunned with Pinako's behavior, and once again her jaw was hanging open. "Should…" Winry said softly. "Should I have gotten something stronger?"

Pinako didn't think at a time like this she could laugh, but she felt herself choke into the Sherry bottle during her second swig and then she was almost roaring with it. Winry stared, the detached and shell-shocked stare of a traumatic event victim, and Alphonse continued crying.

Pinako laughed herself into tears and then all at once they felt real and she was frightened with them. She couldn't start crying in front of the children. They'd be terrified. So she pulled it together. She pulled it together the way she had in the kitchen when she hung up the phone, knowing her son and daughter-in-law were then dead, and Winry came trotting in wearing one of her mother's old hats and gloves, with a tiny teapot in one hand and asked if she was okay.

"Everything is going to be fine," Pinako said softly, voice a bit raspy with the tears that had threatened to come. She cleared her throat and shared a sharp glance between Winry and Alphonse. Winry regained strength and hope with this statement, but Alphonse was an echoing banshee.

"Is nii-san going to die!" Alphonse wailed.

"What!" Pinako snapped angrily. Winry had the exact same response, but her exclamation sounded horrified, as if Ed's death hadn't even occurred to her.

"Is nii-san going to die!" Alphonse repeated. "He was bleeding everywhere! I couldn't stop it! I didn't even have time to see mom! I came straight here! And look at him!" Alphonse lifted both arms out and indicated the bed with all of him shaking. "He's dying!"

"No one is going to die!" Pinako yelled, raising her voice and making it powerful. "Ain't no one ever died in my office, ain't no one dying today!" _Reference of Ed's death was not what stood out to her in Alphonse's words. _"Now you get yourself together you clanking tin can! Winry knows what she's doing and I am putting her in charge!" _It was that other comment. _"One thing the Rockbells are good at is impressive patient recovery and Ed will be no exception!" _It was that comment about Trisha._ "We're going to care for him and tomorrow he'll be in a very different place!" _Was Trisha over at the house?_

The idea was haunting, and Pinako felt a shiver run through her. She already knew she had to go look, but part of her was scared shitless. What if she looked, just went to her front door and looked, and there was Trisha, standing dead and how the Earth would have spit her out, staring back from the Elric window.

Pinako turned to Winry. Winry was nodding enthusiastically to Alphonse, with her little face fat with misery and her eyes pink from tears. Pinako lowered her voice to a soft kind tone and said, "Winry, you complete paperwork for Ed, do all his initial exams, while I step out," she said, leaving the room. Winry had purpose, and was moving with skillful accuracy, but Alphonse felt blindsided.

"Wait a minute granny!" Alphonse cried, running after Pinako. For the better part of this chaos the front door had been left open, and the rain had been blowing in. The area where Alphonse initially arrived was a red puddle too light to be pure blood, but too dark to be largely rain water. That carried down the hall from where it had leaked from his body, and trickling along with it were real splotches and drippings of Ed's blood. Their downstairs lavatory now looked as if someone had dropped a pot of sauce. On the floor where Pinako had first cared for Ed, his limbs wouldn't stop leaking, and against the white tiles the scene was grotesque. Everywhere the Elric boys had been was stained with water and blood, and the smell of it all carried the wet soil from the outdoors, as if death was coming in with them.

"Wait a minute granny!" Alphonse said, plowing into the small accent table Pinako had in the hall. He destroyed half of it like a wrecking ball, and three picture frames and a glass figurine toppled off and smashed together about his feet.

Pinako whirled around to the noise and collision of him. She was more than flecked with blood, she looked like a butcher, and much of her was wet from continuously holding Ed's drenched body. "Alphonse!" she yelled, watching him try and get a handle on himself. His feet were too big for him, and he was slipping. He stepped on half of the unbroken figurine and the glass gave a loud pop under his food as it buckled into shards.

"Boy, watch what you're doing!" Pinako ordered angrily. She wasn't worried about damage to the house. They could fix it later. She stalked to the front closet and opened it for a raincoat. "Alphonse, Winry is just a little thing, and you're going to end up stepping on her! You step on my niece, and I'll have ya living in the yard with Den!"

"Granny!" Alphonse cried, crunching over the glass in panic. "Where are you going! You have to help nii-san!"

Pinako pulled her raincoat on and flipped the hood up. "I did help him. I helped him all I can for the moment. Winry's going to get his vitals and details for us. I don't need to do that. The IV won't let him die Alphonse, don't worry."

Alphonse looked frazzled, as if somehow in a childish form of fantasy he believed he could carry Ed to them for help, and Ed would magically get better.

"It takes time," Pinako said plainly. "It takes time Alphonse." She buttoned herself with him standing mute in the hallway and stepped into the open front threshold. "I am going to get ya things," she said, and he startled. "Stay in the house, and stay with Winry. If she tells you something, you do it," she said, before stepping out and slamming the door behind her.

She couldn't wait. For some reason, she couldn't wait any longer. She had to know what was over there. She had to know what they had done.

* * *

**Hello and Welcome!  
**Oh my gosh, I am so excited to finally be posting this story! THANK YOU ALL who joined the official prescreen 12/20/13, I hope the teaser wet your tongue. This story has been years in the making folks. I always knew this day would come, but somehow "The Big Bang Theory," was always being shuffled between other things I was writing. Also, I think I was a little embarrassed to publicly invade Ed's privacy so harshly…but, "The Silent Heart" got me over it, so here I am.

I sincerely hope you will enjoy this story.

**Posting Schedule:  
**"The Big Bang Theory," is fully completed and 14 chapters, released today 01/01/14. (Yeah!) It will be updated weekly, on Friday, with the exception of chapter three_. I know, I am sorry guys. But chapter two is such a killer, and I want to allow people time to find this story. I really can't wait to release it._ If you are new to my penname, this is how I roll. My stories are generally long, they're posted on schedules, and you are generally guaranteed a min of 15 pages a chapter. _As a standard I like 20 page chapters, I find that comfortable._ This means BBT will conclude 04/11/14…which is perfect for me, because I love to travel, and will be leaving to Japan in April. Unlike in "Foolish For You", you won't have to wait for me to go on vacay and come back, _although I am super proud of myself for updating while in Europe last time. _Unofficially, I will probably post one or both of my FMA oneshots upon return, because I have no idea what Tokyo jet lag is going to do to me. …Hm, getting off topic…moving on!

**Disclaimer:  
**I usually do not make individual story disclaimers, but while BBT is accurately rated T, I worry it may have scenes which feel of a higher rating simply due to the graphic nature of which they are written, so please take note. PM if you have any questions or concerns.

**I Ask One Thing Of You:  
**I ask one favor of you, speaking on the behalf of others.  
JOIN and ADHERE to the: Review Revolution.

Membership is free if you list me as your reference, and there is an annual dinner (chicken or veggie selection), it's semi-formal, so it gives you an opportunity to dress up, there is a raffle, open bar only from six to seven, so don't arrive late…I hope you're not believing this, lol. But seriously! On a really serious note…

This entire event really is special.

However long it just took you to read chapter one, is actual time, calculated in minutes, of your life, which you just gave to me – and the time it took me to write it, in actual time, calculated in minutes, is part of my life I gave to you.

We just made a unique and personal transaction – and at present state it is one sided. I wrote, you read, price is paid on my end, please complete your end, and leave a review. If you don't it's a robbery.

I can say honestly I haven't liked every story I've read. Some are really bad, and I would cringe, thinking, what the heck am I going to say to this writer? But I can honestly say, I left some type of review. It's painful sometimes, I sympathize, but I am honestly making this campaign in hopes for a change in routine, a change in expectation, a change in appreciation. I am legitimately trying to change your **perspective** on why reviews are important, why they are necessary, and why, although they seem small and stupid, they are such a tremendous gift.

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As the reader, you are the ONLY person who can, and if you don't, it is because you decided not to. You greedily read what was supplied, and decided, not to say thank you, when it is the polite thing to do. _In every part of the world, you say thank you, when handed something. We are human in this way._

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* * *

Chapter Two: _Trisha, _will be posted Friday 01/10/14. I hope to see you there.


	2. Trisha

.

* * *

The Big Bang Theory  
Chapter Two  
_Trisha _

- mirage-

Outside the rain was angry angular drops, fat and fast. The wind had it coming at a steep slant, and Pinako stepped off her dripping steps into the moist Earth and began squishing her way up to the Elric house. In the storm what was a cute slightly crooked white house, looked twisted and wrong. She'd swear the entire thing was leaning over as if ill, with the chimney a squiggled line off to the side, and the shudders drooping forward.

The heart of the storm was closing in on them. She had noticed it in the guest bedroom where the single light bulb kept the lighting dim and ugly. The occasional flash could be noted, and it had been sparse. Now, she was certain it was coming closer, blowing towards them and downhill from the Elric house as if it were following the boys.

"I am a stupid old woman," Pinako said, trying to stop her mind from making thoughts like that. It wouldn't help her, and it wouldn't help them. The boys were two innocent little things, and they were stupid because they were young, there was nothing evil about it.

In her hand Pinako clung tight to her lantern. She would wait until she arrived to light it, and in the cold rain her fingers were turning to ice against its metal ring. She hadn't expected to stay dry on the way, but she couldn't say she was happy about how wet she was getting. She held her hood down to herself, tipped her face away from the rain, and stomped forward. Her dress was blowing up high about her shins, and the rain had her legs drenched. She had ignored her boots even though they were with her coat, somehow they hadn't occurred to her, and when she finally reached Trisha's front door, she grabbed the open screen. It was flapping uselessly against the closed oak door. She could imagine Alphonse bolting out the front, his metal legs stretching in wide lunges, too wide for any human, head thrown back and howling with Ed flopping about in his arms like a cloth doll.

Pinako trudged up the few steps to the oak door and turned the latch. She opened it an inch, paused, and then stepped in. The house was entirely dark, with nothing more than the sound of the pattering rain on the roof and windows. It was eerie, and the moment Pinako stepped in she shivered violently with the sense that she was not alone. She was staring into the house, and she felt sure, as sure as she was standing there, that something was staring back.

_And the smell_. It took her for a moment. The smell was potent, rising up with the scent of dark wet soil, decay, and something new, something fresh and slaughtered.

"My god," Pinako whispered, covering her mouth in shock. She had been in Trisha's house hundreds of times, so she knew where she was. She knew she was standing at the only crossroad the tiny farm house had. To her left was the small living room, to the right the door to Hohenheim's study, directly in front of her the stairs leading up and the short and tiny hallway into the kitchen. In the darkness she couldn't see any of it. If this had been a stranger's house she would have been afraid, but from practice she knew for certain how many steps it took to reach the stairs. She knew with a little light she would see the short oak table Trisha had alongside the stair railing, and set upon it would be that terrible plant which always looked as if it were wilting and never bloomed. She knew directly above it would be two small framed photos, one of the Elric family standing together, and one of the boys when Alphonse was first born. Holding a blanket wrapped Alphonse, Ed wore a perplexed expression seeming unsure if he were excited or annoyed.

Quickly, with a shaking hand, Pinako raised the lantern, twisting its slender handle into a flame, and extended it forward.

She called out, "Trisha?" in habit, in mounting nervousness, and felt like a scared fool directly after. "Trisha, you here?" _What did she want, an answer?_ Good god, the thought terrified her. What if something had, in a low and raspy voice, purred out a response? Or perhaps even more disturbing, something sweet and feminine, answering from the kitchen where Trisha used to make her famous blueberry muffins. "Get a hold of yourself," Pinako whispered, stepping in with false bravado. She was not going to let a little rain storm spook her. She had to know what had happened, and she didn't want the boys coming back for their things.

Pinako made it only three steps and then she crunched over glass. Curious she lowered the lantern and below her feet it was glittering in a long smear of blood. Startled, she staggered back until she was flush against the door. She fanned the lantern about her ankles and gapped in horror. The blood wasn't right, it was blood, but it was the wrong color. It was the blood of something long dead. It wasn't the bright red of the living, it was the dark and blackish blood of a corpse, and it was smeared along the floor on either side of her as if something had gone dragging itself on its belly.

"What have they done?" Pinako whispered, feeling a weak and wobbly sense grow in her legs. It was impossible to tell in what direction the blood smear item had been going in, but what was clear, was that it was moving fluidly. Down the stairs, past where she stood, into the living room, back again, into the kitchen, back again, up the stairs. It were as if the Elric house were painted with a ruby carpet of clots and clumps of something that frightened her. _Frightened her right down to her bones._ It meant either the boys had dragged something, or something was moving around.

Slowly Pinako started forward. She held the lantern out like a weapon and walked steadily to the kitchen. The room looked untouched aside from the floor. The counters were clean, and the kitchen presentable. After Trisha died, Pinako had not made an effort to pack up the house. Without someone to take over, it was somehow easier to simply walk over once a month and give it a good once-over with a rag. Then the boys went to Dublith, and it was every two months she went over and gave it a clean. It was hard to pack when you didn't know where you were shipping things. So the place looked as Trisha left it. The small kitchen table had a bowl of wooden red apples, the counters were bare save for three decorative plates set upright near the stove. They had a country apple print, and Pinako remembered Trisha saving up for them.

Pinako took the few steps needed to peer into the living room, and was disturbed with the minor disruption in the room. The slender couch, bookshelf, and reading chair Trisha had, all facing the fireplace were perfectly in place, because they were heavy items. The oak coffee table and single stool, which often held a potted plant or which ever boy had misbehaved, were not. The coffee table was shoved aside as if someone had run into it, and the stool had been knocked over.

What Alphonse had done after everything: when he woke up in the armor, when he realized Ed was bleeding, when he thought Ed might be dying, and when he tried to flee, were a mystery. He could have run in circles. He could have destroyed the place in his new metal body. This could be him, and she would have believed it, _she wanted to believe it_, but her gaze fixed on the stool and the contrary evidence. It was cast aside, as if it had gone flying upon impact, and painted down its side was the clotted blood: the dark dank of the Earth, the death she felt reaching up into everything, the filth of the sin, and the rot of it all.

Pinako turned back to the kitchen, casting the lantern's glow over the counters, and to the empty and clean sink. Outside a flash of lightning came, and she could see the small hearts framing each apple on Trisha's standing decorative dishes. She could see heavy damage to the side of the counter top, like a car had plowed into it, and she could see the open basement door.

It was yawning into the room like a black mouth, and leaking out of it, was a soft rolling mist.

She knew at once that's where they'd done it, and with that certainty she knew that's where she was going. Holding the lantern tight, with legs beginning to feel more and more like rubber, Pinako stepped up to the black doorway and cast the soft glow down the stairs.

The basement was silent, and smearing down the steps was the old bad blood. Flecked up the steps in heavy drips and drops was new red blood, and she had to believe that was Edward. She could envision it pouring out of him into Alphonse's arms and leaving a trail as Alphonse clambered up from the blackness. All about the doorway she stood in, and along side the single wall of the descending stairs, were deep scrapes and destruction from his metal shoulder pads. He had charged up them, his body five, six, seven times its original width, with metal spikes coming out in places, and the strength of ten oxen. Some of the stairs looked dented inward from his stomping, and he had all but taken the wood work off the left side of the basement door.

With a deep breath, Pinako took a careful step onto the first rickety plank of wood. She couldn't feel the moisture below her, but she knew it was there. The basement smelled like an open stomach. About her small brown shoe, the mist gave a gentle swirl and continued its slow and spreading flout.

Even with the raincoat wet and uncomfortable, she hooked her arm about her face, burying her nose and mouth in it to lock out the stench. She didn't know what she was going to find. She didn't know what she was going to see for it to have a smell like that. She had witnessed animal slaying, and done so herself. In the fall when she made chicken soup, she went out, picked one, slit its throat, and prepared it, and nothing, nothing had ever smelled like this. _It was sin_, she was certain of it. It was festering abomination, and she took each step one at a time, staring ahead with wide glassy eyes. She was as scared to look as she was to look away. The closer she came to the bottom, the more of the room she could see.

There was the old work bench Hohenheim and Trisha had used when building the house, and for home repairs. There was the second suit of armor, now knocked aside from where she had to imagine either Edward or Alphonse had pushed it over. There were a few old bookshelves against either wall with resources Hohenheim had brought, and a few standard shelves of canned goods and canning supplies. Several supply barrels were in the back right corner, the one of flour overly familiar as she often picked one up for Trisha while in town to save the girl the trip.

The basement was in what, at first glance, appeared to be recognizable order. There was no massive destruction, or extreme change to the room, and that was the eeriest thing about it. At the bottom of the stairs Pinako stopped when she accidentally nudged one of two unnoticed suitcases. They were out of place, and she understood the boys came home from Dublith, and gone right to the basement. This was so disturbing to her she uprooted her gaze, because the thought saddened her to illness.

With Trisha's death the boys were turning into something wrong, as if all they had left to feed off was Hohenheim, and he was saturating them with what Trisha had always diluted. Without her, his existence was fixing their narrow gaze into science and alchemy and causing the rest of the world, and the beauty of it, to fade away. The good parts of life, the innocence Trisha had taught them, was being corrupted. When she died they became like ghosts. Alphonse went entirely mute, and Ed clung to the boy as if he needed Alphonse to breath. They had become obsessed, and now she knew why.

Swallowing thickly, Pinako stepped into the room, and held the lantern forward. Across the floor were the symbols the boys were always studying: a transmutation circle almost as large as the room. She could see that the initial design was flawless, but now it looked as if something as dark as ink, and as rotten as flesh had been dumped into it. In the center was a huge black stain, like a cancer. She knew at once that was where it happened, and felt relieved there was nothing other than the smell and mess left behind. Her lungs gave a huge deflating sigh of relief, and she held her hand to her chest as her anxiety unwound from the tight and painful ball it had constricted into.

They had tried and failed, but the windows could be opened to air out the smell, the floors could be mopped, and she would go home and help them mend.

Pinako felt a smile come to her face. Standing in the blood of it, things were not all that bad. Even with all said and done she still had two grandsons, or two adopted nephews, or three children, however you wanted to look at it.

Feeling a bit uplifted, she turned around to return to the stairs and froze in absolute horror. It took less than the time needed in that single forward step, for her mind to realize something was now in front of her, and for her gaze to find it.

From the top of the stairs, leaning in as if to see, and twisted to stare directly at her, was a misshapen head with two perfectly white eyes glowing like cat's eyes in the lantern light.

Pinako had never believed she would experience a moment in her life where she might actually piss herself in fear, but this suddenly came close. She hadn't so much as looked up and noticed the thing, she had looked directly at it, and it was staring back at her just as plainly.

The head was upside down with its cheeks sunken in and its skin dark the way a body decays. Bits of hair were still attached to its scalp and hanging down over a few steps and off the side of the stairs like a black mop.

Suddenly the lantern light began to shake, and Pinako came to realize it was her own arm and body. She was shaking in fear, and when the lantern began a soft swing under the tremble of her hand, the thing looked at it.

It looked at the new motion, disregarded it, and returned its gaze to Pinako before beginning a slow stretch of its mouth, as if beginning to scream in slow motion. When its mouth was almost entirely open, a low bronchial sound came wheezing from it, and the pitch and force of it was hostile.

Pinako staggered back shaking; unaware she was trying to put distance between herself and the creature. When she moved it raised its voice until it was screaming at her. Its white marble eyes growing wider, spreading to the point she thought the skin would crack, and then it moved.

A thin shriveled arm, something that looked mummified, came snaking forward and slapped down on the stair below it. Then a second arm came, reaching forward for the next stair, slapping down and taking hold, and the thing began dragging itself along.

Its body was coming into view, and Pinako felt bile push up her throat. The lantern was swinging under the tremor in her frame.

Coming out the side of the creature, or perhaps the top of it, were its ribs, as if the rib cage for a large bird had been sewn into its back. Some of the bones were still in its flesh, and some were poking out like white spears. If it had legs, Pinako wasn't sure, and with it hissing and beginning a low growl at her, she didn't plan to find out.

In a loud, firm voice, one that scared her even though she was the owner, Pinako yelled out, "Don't you even think about coming over here!" She made her words as vicious sounding as she could, and tipped her face down into a dark and twisted snarl. "Don't you think of it!"

The creature's head snapped up, as if with shock, and it turned to her, its white void eyes shinning, and its mouth working in a slight open and close. It stopped moving, and part of it, what Pinako had to assume was a leg or legs, thumped down from one stair to another, as if it were a useless heavy tail.

"You come over here," Pinako said, lowering her voice and making it mean. "And I'll crush what little life you have right out of you, you understand?" She didn't think it could. She didn't want to believe it could, and so she put the threat she wanted to convey into her voice the best she was able. She was scared shitless. She'd never been as scared in her life as she was at this moment, and with the thing blocking the only exit to this sad blood stained room she decided firmly, she was not going to die in the Elric basement. Not with Winry over at the farmhouse. Not with her granddaughter in reach of the thing, and Edward bleeding out, and Alphonse in a suit of god damn armor. _No, she had things to do._

"Or maybe, you want to come over here?" Pinako asked, taking a quick step forward. Doing so was painful. The last thing she wanted was to get any closer to it, but she couldn't let it see her fear. The creature hitched with her advance, and the first emotion Pinako had ever seen on its face appeared.

Raw. Violent. Anger.

Suddenly its expression contorted into something vicious. Its shriveled, leaking, upside down forehead tightened into thick curls of fury, turning its expression into a reign less frown, while it's mouth became bigger. Pinako thought it was open before, but she was learning quickly that what she thought was open, wasn't anything. Now its mouth was stretching, and pulling back as if it had teeth, and maybe with the lantern light she couldn't see them, but she sure as hell didn't want to. From the depth of it, a sound came crying up like the low baritone of a woman, but swam faster and faster towards something staccato, until that dry dirt caked voice was shrill and piercing. It slapped its arms down screaming at her, and the force of its throat was pushing up a black pulpy liquid, like bad crude oil. It came sputtering out its mouth, spitting forward, and leaking down the things face and shinning unblinking eye.

Pinako felt a bit of urine seep into her panties, and in blind fear she reached to the side, grabbed one of Trisha's canned peppers, and threw it down in front of her so it smashed. "Come on!" she yelled. She grabbed a second jar and threw it down. "Get your ass over here! Come on! You want to taste me!" She grabbed the corner of the case of jars and steadied it. She took hold with white knuckles, facing the creature down and got ready. She was going to toss the shelf over and blow out the lantern. She didn't know if the thing could see in the dark, but she was hoping to god t couldn't.

It wasn't a fear she'd drop the lantern and set the entire house on fire, no that would be just fine. It was the fear she'd set the entire house on fire with her still in it. That if something happened and she didn't get out, that the thing would. That it would drag its shriveled bone stabbed body outside, and what was the closest thing? _The children._ My god, it was the god damn children!

"You get the hell over here!" she screamed. She began stomping her feet and screaming at the top of her lungs. "_Come taste me!_ I'll put you right, _I will put you right!_"

The thing came. Its speed before was deceptive, something contemplative, and now it was moving with the speed of an animal down only one leg. All sorts of stuff was leaking out of it, and sliding off it, and before it came charging off the stairs, and straight for her, Pinako realized that the blood smears upstairs were this thing. That it had been walking around the house, perhaps since it was born, perhaps since Alphonse picked up Ed's bleeding body and ran. All alone it had been crawling around the Elric house, with them next door, their doors unlocked, and many of their windows open. Pinako didn't know if it was investigating, if it was thinking, or if in some blind animal instinct it was just moving. If it knew enough to want to get out, or if it was just using energy it had to drag itself in senseless forward momentum because it could.

However, when it charged off the stairs, arms suddenly strong and capable, clawing into the dirt and working like running legs, Pinako was certain it was coming to harm her. It was coming to attack her, and maybe she had provoked it, and maybe it was just as evil as it looked.

Screaming Pinako pulled the shelf of Trisha's canned goods over. She wasn't sure if it fell onto the things wailing body, or if it fell in front or behind it. She blew out the lantern as she stumbled back, and screaming, ran about the edge of the room for the stairs. She knew where they were without the light, just as she had known what the Elric foyer looked like.

Pinako reached for the stairs, grabbing blindly, sure the thing was closing in, sure it was stretching out its blood-leaking bone-cased fingers for her. As she found the stairs she stepped on something warm and soft, like a bag of ground meat, and the thing snarled out a hollow committed sound of fury she knew would stay with her for the rest of her life. _She had stepped on part of it_, somehow, part of it was trailing that far behind. Was it a leg? The grubby curled snake of an intestine? Miscellaneous bones it didn't know how to assemble trapped in dragging flesh like a bag of spare parts?

She didn't know. She ran screaming. She fled up the stairs, slammed the basement door behind her, and collapsed into it, her body hyperventilating and shaking so hard it was painful. Already she could hear it coming back up the stairs, and its speed was fierce.

Terrified Pinako dropped the lantern and bolted out the front door and into the rain. She slapped at the oak door as she left, hoping it would shut, but she didn't have it in her to spend that extra second to make sure it did. She was running full speed. The hood of her raincoat flew back, and the water was pelting her face, and pasting her hair to her head. The front of her glasses were useless blurs of water and all about her legs she could feel the mud shooting up with her careless heavy foot falls. She made it well past the Elric mailbox, and down the road when she dared to look back over her shoulder.

In the darkness, there was nothing but the ink stain of the Elric's crooked house bobbing frantically in her sight before the lightning struck. A sharp blade of it across the sky, and everything flashed a cold crisp white.

It was enough. It was enough to see the Elric house, with the shudders Trisha had pained by hand, and the flower boxes in the low windows. There was the short fence Hohenheim had put up for her, and the path leading from the mailbox to the front steps of swept dirt. The front screen door and front Oak door were blown back in the wind, and the entrance to the house looked like a black cave. The opening to something horrible, and there in the doorway, its white eyes glowing, its black hair hanging onto the steps, and ribs poking up to the sky, was the thing.

It was looking at her. As sure as Pinako was of anything, its gaze was fixed directly on her. Pinako tore her eyes away, looked forward, and willed her body to run faster. She put everything she had into it. Her heart was booming in her chest. Legs and arms working in a blur with her raincoat flush to her and the hood collecting water. Her house was coming into view, looking quaint and at peace with the lights on inside and out. Even from where she was she could see Winry moving around in Post Surgical. Her granddaughter was redressing her hair up in a pony tail with a pair of latex gloves hanging from her mouth. Her expression was tight with worry, but she was working quickly to do what was asked of her. Framed in the warm glow of the window Winry looked like a target, and that's what they were becoming.

Pinako cursed. She was leading that thing directly to them, but what was she to do? With her hand outstretched for her own railing, another flash of lightning came, and she looked back.

The Elric door was still wide open, the black death of it seemed to be growing as if the door was expanding. The house looked worse than ever, buckling over on the right as if it would split, but the doorway was empty.

Pinako grabbed the railing panting hysterically. She tripped, slipping in the mud and water, and threw herself to the stairs, hugging the railing tightly for stability and support. For a moment her mind said she imagined it all. None of it happened. She had gotten spooked, she had seen a shadow, she was out of her mind! She didn't want to believe it. She couldn't believe it, and what would she tell them! What would she say! My god, they were just children! They were just boys! It could have attacked them too. Ed could have passed out or gone into seizure with his injuries, and Alphonse could have walked over the thing without feeling it!

So there was a chance! A god damn chance that they hadn't realized their failed resurrection was hungry, that it was thoroughly pissed, and laying down a nice new carpet of blood about the house.

Pinako dragged her legs beneath her from where they had slid out. With a shaking hand she reached up to her own door knob, chest gasping for air, eyes wide and staring into the night. _The doorway had been empty. The doorway had been empty._ She felt calmer, if just from the safety of her own home, before the lightning flashed again. The white light came, and once more she saw the house, the open door, the vacant step, and then she noticed movement. Down by the mailbox, there it was, its heap of a body coming, its white eyes open and zeroed in on her with clarity. _It was coming._

Pinako felt her jaw fall open in silent thought-blurring shock. After the lightning the hill was black again. The wind was still roaring, the rain coming down in buckets, and then lightning again. She looked to where the thing had been and it was now several feet closer into the road. Its mouth was wide and she knew it was screaming. With the wind, and the rain, and now thunder booming over everything she couldn't hear a sound, but she knew it was screaming.

* * *

Pinako tore into the house like a mad woman. She slammed the front door and locked the deadbolt before hooking up the chain she had only installed because her son had insisted on it. Inside her head a loud noise had started, but outwardly she was perfectly mute. Feet stomping and body dripping, she tore into the living room and dug the shotgun bullets out from the back of the fireplace mantel.

Winry heard her return and called out a questioning, "Grandma?"

Pinako could hear Alphonse talking. His hallow squeaking voice was going a mile a minute inside Post Surgical. On autopilot Pinako went to the kitchen, shut and locked the back door, and took both shotguns from the pantry.

Winry entered the kitchen. Her flip flops and legs were fluffed with blood clotting powder, and the front of her dress was speckled with bits of blood and water, but her expression held conviction. "Grandma, I've done most of Ed's instatement exams, but we really should have measured his wounds before we bandaged them." Pinako sat both guns on the kitchen table and ripped open the ammunition. "I tried to estimate the size of both, but I don't think I did a good job. Also, Ed's running a high fever so…" Winry trailed off. Her voice was thick with congestion from her crying, and her eyes were still swollen, but her face was dry.

Pinako loaded the first shotgun and grabbed an unopened box of ammunition. Winry's tiny expression went from bad to worse, watching Pinako with mounting alarm. "Grandma," Winry said, voice soft with nervousness. "What are you doing?"

Still dripping Pinako turned to the girl, and the sight of Pinako's twisted expression caused Winry's jaw to drop. The girl staggered back a quick frightened step.

Pinako couldn't imagine what she looked like. What having lived a moment looking at that thing had done to her, or how a person in the heat of true fear was supposed to appear, but however that was, Winry recognized it. Even as a little thing, having never seen truly atrociousness in the world, she recognized it the way any animal has the instinctual ability to recognize danger.

"You remember how to work the gun Winry?" Pinako asked, advancing on the small girl. She grabbed Winry's right hand and pressed the barrel into it. "It's loaded," she warned. At least with Alphonse in the armor and Ed strapped to the bed, the only thing Winry was likely to accidentally shoot in panic was the house.

"What's wrong!" Winry cried, eyes welling with tears of fright. "What's happening!"

Alphonse came lumbering into the blood and water smeared hall. "Granny!" he cried, looking frantic. "Please help nii-san! I think he's dying again!"

"Alphonse!" Pinako snapped, tone sharp. "You close every window in this house, you understand! You go close every window in this house and lock them!" She left the gun with Winry's and walked to the one on the table. "I am going outside to shoot something."

"What!" Winry and Alphonse called together.

"Grandma, no! How can you be doing that at a time like this!" Winry said, beginning a confused and frustrated crying. "I really need help! I am not qualified to deal with child automail patients! Also, I can't do all of Ed's initiation grandma! I just can't! We don't have any of the information we would have obtained from his preliminary exams and questionnaire so I am missing lots for comparison!"

Pinako loaded her shotgun, stuffed two packs of ammunition into her rain coat and turned around to look at the kids. In a calm voice she said, "If anything tries to get in the house that does not look and sound like me, you shoot first and ask questions later." Then she cocked the gun and left out the front door. "Lock it behind me Winry!" she called, pulling her hood up over her hair. Winry rushed to the open doorway wearing an expression of overwhelmed defeat and stood with the wind blowing droplets of rain into her. "Lock it!" Pinako called, waving to the girl. "You're in charge now! You guard the house!"

"What!" Winry screamed.

"Lock it!" Pinako ordered. She started up the road with the gun ready. She didn't think the thing was capable of speed as great as a human. Hopefully it would still be toward the Elrics somewhere in the road watching her. Deliberately she had used only the front door. She didn't want it knowing there were other ways into the house, and she traveled twenty feet when lightning hit and there it was. Further up ahead like a big black patch. The only defining feature was the eyes, like burning candle wicks in the dark. It spotted her immediately, and its movement became more sporadic.

Pinako lifted the gun into an aim. "Get down here!" she called, advancing quickly. She broke into a jog, running at it, and when she was thirty feet away she fired. The sound of the gun was lost in the thunder, but the spark of it firing wasn't. She had a double barrel, and she fired off the second before she knew what damage the first shell made. Then she reloaded quickly.

Her hands began shaking when she dug two new shells out of her pocket and quickly plugged them in. She cocked it, raised it, and advanced cautiously, but this close she could see the thing wasn't moving. "You alive!" she called. Shuffling in a slow hunter's walk, she began to circle to the right of it. "Are ya or ain't ya!" she called, and then the lightening flashed, and she could see that either the first or second bullet had taken off half its head. There was only one eye left, and it was hanging off to the side, the glow smothered and gone.

It had only taken two shots.

All that for two shots.

For a long moment Pinako stood in the pouring rain aiming at it, unable to fully accept it was dead, before firing two more into the belly of it. When it didn't move, and she had to believe it couldn't be living with half its head and four shotgun blasts at nearly point, she grabbed hold of one of its protruding ribs and dragged it back to the Elric house. She couldn't leave it out in the road where the children would see it. With enough lightening, and certainly with sunrise, they might. Alphonse hadn't seemed to put anything together when she left with her gun, so she was betting on the fact he hadn't seen it, and if he had, it hadn't been this way. She had to believe Trisha or no Trisha, this thing would have scared the pants off two small boys. _Missing limbs or no missing limbs._

With the ground wet, she dug a grave for it in the front yard by the foundation. She didn't have the energy in her to find a suitable spot, she just needed it in the ground. Water from the roof was coming down heavy in the area she chose, and that was the only deciding factor. She went down four feet, pushed the thing in, and covered it back up. When she returned home, soaking wet, covered in mud, and carrying her gun, she looked like a grave robber. The adrenaline of it, and the effort of shoveling made her arms weak noodles, and the gun barrel was dragging behind her.

After she buried it she went back into the house. Loaded gun aiming in front of her, an extra shell held between her teeth like a fat cigar in case she needed one that quickly. She went room to room and made sure there weren't more of them. She kicked over chairs, checked under the beds, and shaking, made her way back into the basement, with the gun raised and yelled into the darkness, daring anything to come out and get her. She fired a single round into the black spot in the floor, just to be safe. Then she took the boys' things and left.

Pinako trudged into Post Surgical. She dropped the boys' suitcases in the hall, but wouldn't relinquish the gun. Alphonse was scared of her, even in the armor, and he stepped back and slightly behind Winry as if he could hide behind the thin frail body of a female child who didn't equate to the width of his arm.

Winry's expression was twisted with disagreeable confusion, and holding the loaded shotgun she was given she loudly asked, "Grandma, what the heck happened!" Winry lifted an arm and pointed toward the window. "I saw you shoot something!" Pinako didn't think she had it in her to speak. She wasn't certain, but she felt it was entirely possible she would take the secret of what she saw, and what just happened, to her grave. If the boys didn't know what they'd done, there was no reason for them to envision a Trisha like that, slinking itself around the house on its blood filled belly looking for them.

She lied. "Coyote." How would they know any better.

"Coyotes!" Winry said. Winry sounded skeptical, shocked, appalled even. The idea Pinako would stop what she was doing, what was so important inside the house, to go pointlessly shoot coyotes in the rain and thunder, had the small girl reeling. With poor skill but able ability Winry snapped the shotgun open and began wedging the two shells out with her tiny sparkling fingernails. "I did the best I could, but I really need you to look at him!" Winry said, pointing towards Ed with the first freed shotgun shell. Its red case looked like a fat marker in her grasp.

Pinako did so. Winry had given a valiant effort to stabilize Ed, but she was using conventional textbook methods. Ed's fever was so high and dangerous Pinako resorted to home remedies, and ignored the small fortune in medications they owned for three bags of ice. She covered Ed's head, chest, and torso.

With things feeling as if they were slowing down Pinako took a moment to examine him. Aside from the arm and leg, she couldn't find a scratch on him, and that was baffling. She was thorough, investigating his ears, eyes, mouth, throat, she studied every bit of his lungs with a stethoscope, groped his torso so thoroughly to get a sense of his organs she wondered why he didn't burp or vomit, but he was okay. Both Ed and Alphonse had Trisha's skin, fair and sensitive, so they bruised visibly, and burnt in the sun. Although she had only met this Izumi Curtis briefly, and talked to the woman only a handful of times on the phone, Ed was in good shape, and she felt a small part of her warm with happiness he had gone to a good home to study what he found so important to him.

Second to that thought, was the bile rising fear that came with realizing he had taken that much-loved hobby and turned it into something that genuinely seemed to want to eat her.

With Ed unconscious she fit him with the smallest catheter they had, and worried about his urethra all the same. She connected a heart monitor so an alarm would sound if it failed or went sporadic on them, and kept an eye on his temperature. For the moment he was safe, and there was something about how suddenly he had moved from the jaws of death that kept them skeptical. Winry kept repeating the same questions, asking for this to be checked, and for that to be checked, because Ed looked as if he should have died. His little body was a white corpse after his blood loss and trauma, and they could barely comfort themselves.

After giving him a third once over, Pinako called it. "Stop it," she said softly, batting a limp hand to Winry's protests. "He's alive. The heart monitor doesn't lie." She sent Winry to wash up, but the girl restlessly wondered in and out of Post Surgical a few times. First with the mop, as Winry began cleaning up the blood and water in the hall, then with a fat yellow sponge coated in what looked like wet flour, as she scrubbed up the blood clotting powder, and finally in her pajamas.

Winry was half asleep in her pink nightgown with the sparkle neckline, when she returned to Pinako's side and asked, "Grandma, are you sleeping in here?"

Pinako had dragged her kitchen chair into Post Surgical and sat directly in front of Ed's bed against his dresser. His breathing was too fast and too heavy for her to feel calm. It wasn't right. It wasn't the breathing pattern of someone sleeping, it was the breathing pattern of someone in stress, and she feared him rousing again.

"Just go to bed Winry," Pinako said, giving the girl a tired but pleasant smile. "I'll keep an eye on him and I am sure Ed will be just fine."

Winry did not look overly comforted. She turned a dull gaze to Alphonse, who sitting on the floor between their two Post Surgical beds, stuck out like a man against doll furniture. Ed's bed was chest height on his great body, and he could easily see Ed laying in it. Pinako had covered Ed with only a sheet, and in an industrial bed made for adults he looked frightfully small.

"I could come sleep in here too," Winry said, padding into the room in slow tromping steps. She crossed it slowly and stopped at Alphonse's side. "Want to sleep on the couch Al?"

Al muffled a soft noise. "No thanks," he said kindly. "But thanks."

Winry gave a dramatic shrug, one that said she was tired of everyone being uncooperative, and went to the window. She unlocked the top to open it a few inches. A closed window was uncommon in their home, but Pinako stopped this.

"Winry, stop!" Pinako cried, sitting up quickly with alarm. Winry turned around, looking startled and confused. "Just…" Pinako faltered. "Just keep it closed tonight girl."

"What?" Winry asked, blinking sleepily. "What for? Why? Cause of the coyotes?"

Pinako nodded forcefully. "Yes," she said. "Yes, because of the coyotes." She waved for Winry to lock the window again, and looking dumbfounded Winry obeyed. "Just for a few days. I want to keep the doors and windows locked, all right?"

Winry was too tired to answer and gave a soft nod and shrug at the same time. Then she wandered out and Pinako heard the girl climbing the stairs one at a time at the speed of a drunk.

* * *

Pinako awoke the next morning to the silent sun filled room. Outside the birds were singing and everything was exactly as she left it. She had slept in her chair directly across from Ed's bed, and he was still laying in it like a broken toy. He had not moved an inch. His body was still sucking heavy from the oxygen mask, and he was still the color of chalk.

At the side of Ed's bed Alphonse sat completely awake. He was less intimidating in the daylight, and might have even looked approachable if it wasn't for the blood splatter flecked about his shell. When Pinako awoke, the metal head turned in a slow creepy swivel to face her and stared.

"Good Morning Granny," Alphonse said, sounding happy, albeit nervous.

Pinako gave her lips a slow lick and croaked out, "Mornin." She had slept with the gun in her hand, and that, like Ed's unconscious self, hadn't moved either. Her fingers ached when she uncurled them from the barrel, and when she tried to sit up, her back protested painfully.

Wincing, Pinako pushed to her feet and gave her neck a crack. She took a quick visual pass of the room, but it seemed as if a dusting calm was born with the dawn. The blackness of last night seemed like an impossible bad dream.

"How is he?" Pinako asked Alphonse, hands on her hips stretching her back. "Did you sleep?"

Alphonse looked to Ed and gave a confused shrug. "I didn't get tired," he said softly. "So I watched nii-san all night."

"Oh," Pinako said. She didn't know what to make of this, though it left more of a bad taste then good. Remaining optimistic, she focused on Alphonse providing surveillance of Ed's first ten hours, and this was encouraging. "How was he last night?" Pinako asked.

"He didn't move or do anything," Alphonse said, sounding discouraged.

Pinako approached the side of the bed and looked down at Ed. He appeared clean, being he no longer had basement dirt and blood on him, but dirty in the way he had not been properly bathed and his hair had not been washed. A light sheen of sweat coated him, making him look clammy and spoiled.

Gently Pinako laid a hand on Ed's forehead. His fever was still running, but it was no where near the danger level of last night. She took Ed's pulse and listened to his heart with Alphonse watching her intently. Ed's heart also sounded fast, but what could she expect. When you didn't plan and execute amputation, the body seemed to become upset about it having pieces ripped off.

"He didn't move, huh?" Pinako said, taking Ed's sheet to his knee and looking at his small naked body. She ran her hand down his chest and gently felt his navel, but nothing seemed to be swelling or bruising. She took a look at his penis and the tip was a dark angry red, making her frown. The last thing she wanted to deal with, in addition to everything , was a urinary track infection, and frowning bitterly, she raised her gaze to Alphonse who was staring at her. "Watcha think?" she asked dryly.

Alphonse sputtered a worried sound of indecision. "Do—do you think he's better?" Alphonse asked. He sounded utterly unsure. Unable to grasp exactly how they'd arrived where they were, and with no idea where to go from there.

"Oh yes," Pinako said, covering Ed back up. "I think he's greatly improved." Alphonse perked up with excitement and Pinako found his naïvety depressing. "Last night Ed was dying Alphonse," she said stonily. "Now he's not, and that is one big fat improvement." Alphonse recoiled with a small frightened cry. "When Ed wakes up, that's the first thing I am going to tell him, and do you know why?" Pinako asked, leaning down and leveling her face with the massive metal head. Alphonse shook it quickly, grasping at his chest plate the way he used to hold his cotton tee shirt. "Because Ed is going to be in a lot of pain. More pain than you can imagine, and he is going to need to hear someone tell him he's not dying, or else he won't believe it."

* * *

Pinako woke Winry with it going on eleven in the morning. Without the girl up and about the place seemed empty, and too off kilter with the Elric boys suddenly back, and causing a greater mess than they ever had before.

Winry was exhausted from last night, and trudged about the house in her pajamas and pink sparkling slippers. Brushing her teeth she came downstairs and went directly to Post Surgical to see Ed and Alphonse.

Pinako returned to washing last night's dinner dishes, the task interrupted when Alphonse came storming in like a blood drenched locomotive. "Winry!" Pinako called. "I want you to unpack Ed's things and put them in his dresser!" She cleaned up the kitchen and made three plates of eggs and toast and then felt as if she shouldn't have. The third plate was for Alphonse, and the casual sight of it steaming made her feel uselessly stupid and unkind. _Did he eat now? Should she ask him?_ What had happened to the tiny body she used to hug and tickle? Was it gone? Did Ed know where it was?

Winry was in Post Surgical holding conversation with Alphonse, and the sound of the children talking made Pinako smile. She left the eggs with Winry happily prattling away.

"Can you feel anything with your hands?" Winry's voice was filled with awe as Pinako approached. "Can you feel the weight of objects Al? Maybe you're super strong now, right?" Pinako stepped into Post Surgical and Winry had opened the boys' suitcase and was packing Ed's modest sum of clothing into the dresser holding her toothbrush. Politely being ignored was Ed's underwear, and Pinako felt a headache coming.

Every step of standard protocol could not be an obstacle like this, or she would not make it. Their designed operation required two, working with the performance Winry was capable of, and not the crush-driven handicap that made her too uncertain and uncomfortable to do something as simple as touch a pair of clean boxer shorts.

"Winry," Pinako snapped, startling the girl. Winry turned around with a curious expression and Pinako indicated the suitcase with a scolding point. "Don't be ridiculous girl." She wasn't going to elaborate any further. She knew Winry understood the meaning. "Trisha taught these boys to be clean, go ahead and pack his shorts into the top drawer. He won't be needing them for a while."

With insult that wasn't entirely hidden, Alphonse immediately asked, "What does that mean granny?"

"It means Ed is going to stay right where he is until I say he can move, and I don't want any clothing on him. He can use his blankets for privacy." Pinako glanced to Winry, but this was not uncommon for patients directly after surgery. Ed could easily stay covered, and they would maintain fast access to any part of him.

"What?" Alphonse asked, sounding worried. "How long is nii-san going to have to stay in bed?"

Pinako gave a heavy shrug. "At least a week. When he wakes up we'll know more."

"A week!" Alphonse cried.

"Al, that's not a lot of time," Winry said, taking the soft optimistic tone she used for patient family members. "Ed's condition is incredibly unstable right now, and the last thing you want to do is unnecessarily agitate it."

Alphonse was startled with Winry's instructional, but empathetic tone, and he glanced between them quickly before muttering a soft, "Wow Winry, I didn't know you knew so much about all this."

"What?" Winry asked, affronted.

"It's really amazing," Alphonse complimented.

Winry tossed one of Ed's tee shirts at Alphonse's metal face and stomped. "It's not more amazing than you two dummies knowing alchemy! I've told you two idiots repeatedly this is what I am doing! You just aren't paying attention. You two don't listen to me!"

"We are listening!" Alphonse insisted, pulling Ed's shirt off his face without any apparent skill. He grasped about his head as if groping blindly, and when he was certain he had managed purchase on the fabric, as he could not feel it, he began tugging gently to see if it would slide off, and it did. "I just didn't—well I just didn't know it—well I am just surprised!"

"And you hardly ever call me!" Winry said, grabbing a handful of Ed's tiny boxers, and shoving them into the top dresser drawer. _With her anger she had no disadvantage._ "And you don't ask me about what I am doing, you only want to tell me about your dumb alchemy! There is more to the world than just alchemy Al, and lots of that other stuff is amazing too."

Pinako left the kids bickering and went outside. She did a quick once around the house with her gun, but everything looked untouched. Up the road in the distance she could just make out the shadow of the Elric house and it felt as if it were looming over her. Although she did not want to, she knew she was going to have to journey back over for one last sweep. Then she would lock the door to the basement and the front door and call it quits. After all this, it would be a while until she could confidently visit to dust.

* * *

Ed roused to consciousness four times before actually sustaining it. The first breach was his third day in the Rockbell home, and he returned to, what Pinako always playfully referred to as, _The World of the Limbed_, enough to cry heavily for almost twenty minutes before going back under. The second time was his fourth day, and he was awake for almost two hours, but unable to understand where he was and what was going on. He was delirious, and Pinako felt the beginning heat of guilt sneaking up on her. Child automail was uncommon, and even more uncommon was the unplanned and unskilled amputation Ed had. She had never done such a vicious amputation on such a young patient, and neither had any of the automail publishers they subscribed to. She was left without any experience or literature to guide her. _Ed was a brand new thing._

In a blind guess-and-check, she did her best to manipulate adult metrics for Ed's unconscious body. She had him on very powerful prescription pain medications, strong antibiotics, muscle relaxers, and a few small odds and ends to help his overall condition. On the first day they connected a feeding tube, so when he finally awoke the fifth day for more brief crying, and then finally for the last time on the sixth day, he returned in the limp state of a fully mediated doll.

Instead of waking up with concern, his eyes simply opened and didn't shut. He was drunk with medicine, and his body didn't know what to do with itself.

"Ed?" Pinako asked, keeping a calm tone of voice. "Ed, can you hear me talking to you?"

Ed didn't look as if he heard anything. His eyes were rolling around in a daze. The only indicator this breach would be unlike the others was his hand. It was moving in an investigatory fashion, and twice she'd seem him grope at the sheets with sensory fascination.

"Ed?" Pinako propped him up with a few pillows. She was ready for him to wake up. _It had been enough time._ She wedged him into a sitting position that kept him from slumping over and then went to the Post Surgical window to verify the kids were still outside. Every time Ed teased them with the idea he was returning Alphonse would become hopelessly excited, and then manic, hung up on the idea of Ed dying when Ed failed to do so. It was exhausting to constantly reassure him, but she couldn't fault the boy. He was living in a suit of armor, with the only part of his family at best, half dead and recovering. It was right for Alphonse to fear for Ed's life. A bad infection, or really, any more dilly-dallying in the Elric house before arriving at her farmhouse probably would have snuffed him out.

Both Alphonse and Winry were outside tending to the garden, and Pinako felt satisfied she had at least a few minutes to experiment with Ed's cognition. In bed he was entirely supported with pillows. What bit of his head she couldn't support was lolled to the side. He was too weak to keep it up, and so medicated, didn't have the instinct he should. His breathing was sloppy, and came heavy and slow through his mouth, and senselessly his eyes were jumping about the room. Pinako was just about to lay him back down when he suddenly looked directly at her.

His eyes had sight in them, and more than just that of visual, it was mental sight: the link to the brain. Pinako kept silent and didn't break their gaze. Aside from his potent stare, everything about him suggested he was signed-off. His body seemed to have no responsive function to his change in position, and from his bottom lip a thin strand of drool was stretching to his chin.

Pinako knew she could call to him, but somehow the sad sight of him made receiving his lack of response worse, and she was sure she wasn't going to get one. He was catatonic, and unblinking stared at her so long she was worried about his eyes, before his tiny pink tongue poked free, and he sucked his string of saliva back into his mouth.

"Ed?" Pinako spoke with disbelief. "Can you hear me talking to you?"

Ed lifted his flesh arm, shaking with fatigue, and wiped at his mouth. He was alert, even if a bit dimmer than he normally was. In a perfectly flat, but clear voice, he asked, "What's going on?" His eyes dropped to his hand and wrist as he smeared it across his chin and felt the medical tape and wires for the IV. He pulled it away from himself and studied it, looking puzzled.

Pinako leaned forward. "Edward, do you understand me?" she asked, _she wasn't convinced yet._ He lifted his gaze to her with his expression moving from a blank slate to building worry. "Try and speak to me if you can." Ed didn't look capable of forming solid thoughts, and Pinako lifted two fingers and asked, "How many fingers am I holding up boy?" Ed's pupils moved slightly, locating her fingers, and Pinako felt a spark of excitement. _That was comprehension._ Ed stared blankly at her fingers as if he couldn't remember how to count. "Ed?"

"Three," Ed whispered, blinking unsteadily as if he couldn't focus before squinting to see better and correcting himself. "Four."

Pinako reduced to a single finger and extended it forward so it would be easier for him to see. "Follow my finger with your eyes tiny boy." She panned her finger slowly to the right, and Ed tried, lolling his head in that direction with his focus unstable. "Just your eyes Ed," Pinako said, panning toward the left. "Just the eyes." He was unable to do this, and slowly his expression started to tighten something fierce. "You're going to be okay, Ed," Pinako said quickly. His eyes were welling with tears, and Pinako gave a few reassuring nods. "Ed, you're going to be okay."

"Ow," he croaked, closing his eyes and squeezing a few tears down his cheeks. "Ow, it hurts."

"What does?" she asked quickly. "What hurts?"

"My arm!" Ed cried, escalating.

Pinako went to his side quickly, and carefully adjusted him to be laying flat. Wiggling into rubber gloves she filled a needle with something she was hoping would numb his nerves and injected it along side the shoulder bandages. He didn't understand the needle in her hand, and didn't feel the injection. The pain was eating most of him, and what little was left she could feel trying to claw its way to the surface. He didn't want to say under. His mind was desperately struggling to find safety and normality, and this pained her, because she knew when he truly regained a sense of himself that was in fact not what he was going to find.

Ed began sniveling, with his expression screwed into a wince and his teeth grit and bared. Directly after the injection Pinako peeled her gloves off and tossed them to the floor. She went at him as the last adult next of kin in his life. With loving hands she cupped his face and kissed his forehead frantically. She had feared he might pass, and hadn't realized how happy she was to see him alive until this moment. All about his forehead and in the roots of his hair was the smell of his baby self, and she clutched at him, desperately, wishing she could hug him, but she didn't dare move him. "Okay, darling," she whispered. "Okay, tiny speck of a bean." She pet her hand up into his bangs and pressed her cheek to his temple hugging him the only way she could and he understood it. His flesh hand reached up and he clutched at her arm, whining to himself miserably.

"Wh—what's going on?" he cried, blinking in deep clenches of his eyes and upper face. Lights were incredibly bright, and scent felt assaulting. His voice was hoarse, crackling out in a dry frightened rasp. "Granny?"

"Ed, you're in the Rockbell surgical ward," Pinako explained, speaking slowly as if he were hard of hearing. He seemed not only confused, but concerned with his location. He was unfamiliar with the white washed walls, and the scent of disinfectants. "You're at Winry's Ed. You're at Grandmas." Ed gave a quick choke of relief as he understood this. Pinako disengaged from him, but didn't feel she had enough cuddling to sate even her old stubborn self. "Try and focus your mind Edward, you're on a lot of medication and it will let your emotions take you." Gently she raked her hand through his hair. "You're badly damaged." Ed tipped his head back and lifted his gaze to her looking curious. Unsure if he truly knew what happened to him, she tried to explain it gently. "Your arm and leg are gone," she paused, "but you know this already, don't you?" She was certain he must. He was a particular boy, and this wasn't the sort of thing that went unnoticed.

Ed looked saddened, but not shocked, and managed a soft and shaky, "Yeah."

"You've lost a lot of blood, but we've bandaged your wounds and it seems you have a lot of nerves left, and that's good, but it does mean it's going to hurt more."

Ed squirmed with misery and crocked out a soft, "Where?" His expression was heartbreaking, and at once she envisioned him all alone, just a little boy, over in that house with that thing, and the fragility of him frightened her. "Where is Alphonse?" Ed asked, sounding frantic. "Where is he? Where's Alphonse?"

"Here," she said quickly. "Alphonse is here."

"It ate him!"

"No, boy," she said softly. "Alphonse is alive." Ed's rate of breath was climbing. He was panicking, but she felt she could reach his mind and cast out a line. "Ed, Alphonse is here at the house with us," she said firmly. "He is alive." Ed's eyes closed voluntarily, buckling him. He knew he was at the receiving end of undeserving mercy. "That's right child," Pinako said softly, stroking his face. "You saved your brother." No one had told her this, but there was something about the frantic ingenuity of the armor that screamed: Edward.

Ed sputtered a laugh of gushing excitement, but it came in the strained and raw noises of pain. Quickly he lifted his single hand and wiped at his face and running nose. "Am I dying?"

"No," Pinako said, breaking a warm smile.

"It feels like I am dying!" Ed cried, keeping composure as tears began tumbling down his face.

"Ed, I am going to teach you something very important," Pinako said, leveling her gaze for serious conversation. "This is called your pain scale, and it goes from zero, the least, to ten the greatest, you paying attention to me?" she asked, watching him for signs of acknowledgement. Ed had tipped his body a fraction of an inch away from her. In his condition this was the equivalent of a healthy person rolling to their side. On his chest he was squeezing the blanket with his single fist as he cried. "Ed, pay attention to me," she said kindly. "Did ya hear what I said? What pain number are you on?"

"Ten!" he screamed. "Ten!"

"Ed, ten is blinding unbearable pain."

"Ten!"

Pinako gave a heavy self scolding sigh. It was medically immature of her to think Ed could manage a pain scale as a child. Unlike an adult, understanding at least the responsibility of pain gradation, Ed only knew he thought he was in awful pain. Although this was anatomical ignorance, it did not discredit the fact he was in terrible pain, so Pinako said nothing. She dismissed the idea of using the pain scale as quickly as she introduced it.

"Is Alphonse here?" Ed asked, sliding his hand onto her leg and grabbing at her dress. "Is he here at Winry's too?" Pinako nodded. "I want him!" Ed broke into sobs. "I want Alphonse!" Pinako recognized the shrill misery of his voice from when he was much younger, and would not go to bed without his brother. In a strange way it made the sound natural, it made the occurrence familiar, and it meant she could be simplistic about things. _If Ed could get what he wanted than he would stop hurting. _"I want Alphonse to come be here!" Ed cried.

"I bet you do," Pinako said, breaking into the faint joyous laughter of one crippled in the heart with relief. She took Ed's tiny chin in her hand and kissed his cheek in several quick affectionate smacks. Ed ignored this and continued crying to himself. "You sit tight, and I'll get him."

Pinako went to the window and hefted it up. Outside Alphonse was none the wiser, standing in the garden with Winry. The girl was wearing cut off summer shorts and a long peach tank top with her bare feet muddy and her hands full of tomatoes. She was in the middle of the garden with Alphonse at the edge holding a fat zucchini. "Alphonse!" Pinako called. Both children looked over. Winry was squinting in the bright sunlight, but Alphonse was unfazed by it. "Get'cha barn sized body in here! Your brother's woken up!"

Alphonse squealed a sound of utter surprise, and clamped down on the zucchini in excitement. In his fist it exploded and the rest of it dropped to the ground as if chopped clean.

Winry's mouth dipped into a silent scream when this happened, but Alphonse didn't notice. He ran for the house. Pinako could feel the vibration of him even through the foundation, and the mass of him came slamming through the halls as if someone were swinging pots and pants into the floor.

"Nii-san!" Alphonse cried, charging to the bedroom.

Ed gasped a loud and hopeful noise with Alphonse's voice, but following it was not the small happy boy Alphonse had been. Alphonse had transformed into a massive suit of armor and went stampeding towards Ed's bed with so much force Ed jerked with fright and tried to shield himself with his twig of a flesh arm. Over his chest the IV wire trailed into the sheets, and Ed's crying silenced entirely with abject surprise before Alphonse began speaking.

"Nii-san! Oh my god!" Alphonse cried, dropping to his knees along side the bed. The sound was an anvil dropping to the floor. "I am so happy you're awake! I didn't know what was happening!"

It was Alphonse's voice that reformed the armor to something safe and personable, and Ed lowered his arm with recognition streaming across his face. It dropped his raised eyebrows in a fast plummet, and Ed threw himself at the armor's head and hugged it with his single arm. Alphonse continued talking wildly, but Ed was hugging the metal head and crying.

Pinako watched this with mixed emotions. The joy she felt that both of them were still alive, and reuniting, was clouded with unease. Alphonse was trapped in an inorganic coffin, and Ed was sobbing into a piece of metal.

Winry approached the window to Post Surgical and leaned into the sill. She unpacked several tomatoes onto the shoulder height wooden plank and stared inward at the brothers. Pinako was impressed Winry had the sense, somehow, to know she needed to wait. That as much as she wanted to see Ed, he needed to go at his own pace and in his own order, and to Edward Alphonse had always come first.

In a loud whining voice Ed began repeating, "I am so glad you're not dead," and Alphonse responded with an overly excited, "me too!" Their conversation was repetitive, simple, and largely based on odd statements that sounded exaggerated and sadly weren't. Ed told Alphonse he thought he was going to bleed to death on the floor, and Alphonse agreed he also thought that was going to happen. Next Ed told Alphonse that he put a seal in the armor to catch Alphonse's soul there in hopes Alphonse would come back, but that he didn't think it was going to work, and sounding ecstatic Alphonse agreed he also found it improbable Ed was able to pull this off.

Conversation was brief, and Ed was losing strength fast. It was leaching the color out of his body, turning his skin paper white and his lips a faded crusty brown. His crying stopped with exhaustion, but his tiny body was shaking as if cold.

With less than a full week under his belt Alphonse was coming into his body, and had circled Ed's tiny flesh self with his arms, but kept from touching. He was cautious of his strength. For six days he had been destroying inanimate objects he simply tried to interact with, and the thought of destroying Ed was real.

"Nii-san, do you hurt a lot?" Alphonse asked, fists clenched with the desire to touch overwhelmingly evident.

"Yeah." Ed's whining still sounded as if he were in tears. "My arm hurts worse than just the leg, and that's so unfair." Ed was wiping at the tears on his face with his breath in sporadic hiccups, and once he was done he reached forward and began petting his hand over Alphonse's metal face. Alphonse had it as close to Ed as he could get, and the sight of this held the bearing of a lion looming down on its vulnerable cub. Alphonse's head was an iceberg to Ed, and Ed was oblivious to the wealth of Alphonse's body hunched over his bed. He knew only that he could see the metal head clearly, and curiously Ed pressed his fingers into the slits on Alphonse's cheeks. "Can you feel me touching you Al?"

"Nii-san, I don't think I have the sense of touch at all now."

"But you remember what happened?"

"Not really," Alphonse said softly, sounding embarrassed. "I can't be sure."

Ed's voice tightened, as if ready to burst back into sobbing, and he asked, "Did you see mom?"

Pinako felt cold fear flood her. She wasn't sure what either of them might remember, but she was sure she didn't want it shared with the other if there was some type of understanding.

"Yes!" Alphonse cried. "I remember something! I saw something nii-san, but not all the way!" Alphonse cried, before adding, "And you were bleeding!" As if this explained why he had left, why he didn't have time for a better look. Why his absence allowed that thing to go crawling about the house investigating.

"Alphonse!" Winry screamed, face going pale. "You really brought your mom back to life!" Winry threw a hand behind her pointing in the direction of the Elric home. "Mrs. Elric!"

"I don't know!" Alphonse cried.

"That's enough of this," Pinako said quickly, beginning a quick shake of her head. "Ed has to rest."

"Oh my god!" Winry cried, consumed with the idea. "We have to go look for her! What if Mrs. Elric is over there now!"

"Winry! Get in this house!" Pinako snapped. The idea of Winry going anywhere near the Elric home, at least for the moment, terrified her.

"But granny!" Winry cried, looking stung. She took a step back from the window and looked out over the field, and Pinako felt herself panic. What could she say to them? They would be curious? Alphonse might feel compelled to go look. Ed might tell him to do so.

"Alphonse, did you see what you two made?" Pinako asked sternly. Cards on the table, she needed to know.

Alphonse began shaking his head sadly. "I couldn't see well. The transmutation makes a lot of condensation and mist. It was hard to see, and I didn't…and with my new body…"

"You didn't see it?"

"I…I can't be sure," Alphonse said, and he sounded confused with what he might have seen, or what he thought he saw. He sounded like a boy who wasn't quite sure what happened in the chaos and Pinako liked that just fine.

"Ed!" Pinako asked, snapping his name the way she did when she caught him red handed. "Did you see whatcha made?" Ed was in the midst of more silent crying, and he choked a heartbreaking sob with this question. "Answer me Ed," Pinako said. She was going to push for this answer, and she walked to the foot of his bed and crossed her arms. Ed was beginning hard labored sobbing. "Ed, look at me," she ordered. "You tell me, did you see it?" _Did he see it? Did he see its shining eyes? Did he see its stretching mouth, or reaching arms? Was it hungry? Was it hungry when it woke up facing a little boy face down in the dirt bleeding out his leg?_

"My mom," Ed croaked, grabbing at his twisted crying expression in torment. "My…"

"You saw it?" Pinako asked, stepping closer. Ed was deeply upset, and she couldn't tell if it was because he was destroyed with the idea of what they had done, or because it had looked at him, and he had looked back. "Alphonse, leave the room," Pinako ordered firmly, without taking her eyes from Ed.

"What!" Alphonse cried.

"Do what I say boy!" Pinako snapped. "Shut the window and leave the room now!"

"Granny no! I can't leave him!" Alphonse's voice sounded surprisingly firm as he contradicted her, and Pinako turned her gaze to Alphonse and sharpened it.

"Oh really?" she said. "Well I guess I'll just stop treating your brother's scrawny hide, how'd you like that?" She assumed this would be a bit more persuasive than giving him time-out. Alphonse gasped a sound of wild shock, as if this absolute bluff could ever be a reality. "Now get'cha butt up off that floor and do as I say."

Alphonse sulked up with confusion, and his footsteps thundered by her towards the window. He closed it in Winry's face, and she was frowning where she stood in the lawn.

"Shut the door behind you, I need to talk to your brother," Pinako ordered.

"Nii-san isn't well granny!" Alphonse said angrily, but Pinako simply raised her hand and waved dramatically, as if swatting a fly. She leaned forward, planting her palms on the bed below Ed's tiny single foot, and lowered her voice just for him. Ed watched Alphonse leave the room crying in the fashion of a true automail patient: openly and without shame.

"Edward, did you see what you made in that basement?" Pinako asked, fixing her eyes on him.

Ed met Pinako's gaze, with his nose running down his face, and his breathing wet and heavy. "It wasn't…right," he said, shaking with the memory of it. Pinako felt her eyes go wide. She knew there was a chance he'd seen it, but my god, she had almost believed on some orchestrated level it wouldn't be allowed because it was simply too cruel. _It was his mother!_ "It wasn't right," Ed repeated, voice growing angry. "I…" He dropped his gaze with shame. "I passed out," he said, falling back into tears of despair. "I killed her."

"What?" Pinako asked, blindsided.

"I killed her, and I killed Alphonse," Ed said, voice so soft, and so full of tears it was nearly incomprehensible. "I killed her and then I killed Alphonse's body." Ed sobbed. "The body she made for him!"

"Good lord Ed," Pinako said, pulling back in shock. She didn't know where to begin.

Ed didn't seem to know. He wasn't afraid, and so she wasn't sure what he saw, but it certainly didn't seem to be the Trisha she had met. So that suggested Ed was speaking from a perspective very different from hers. He had two memories of his mother, the Trisha alive and well, and the Trisha that lived briefly, and apparently barely seen, in the basement last night. He was mourning for it. Pinako could see it already. She had inherited these two grieving boys before, and she knew what Edward Elric looked like when he grieved over death and this was it. This was chest clenching agony, and more, it was self-loathing depression.

"Edward, you didn't kill your mother," Pinako said firmly. A cold unyielding strength came to her voice, and she reached out and grabbed his slender boney ankle. "Do you hear me?" she asked firmly. "You didn't kill her." Ed shook his head in a wobbly disoriented fashion, and Pinako stood up and walked about the bed. "You don't know what you're saying," she said, carefully adjusting the pillows behind him. "Now you're going to sleep."

"I don't want to stay in here! I want go to my own room!" Ed cried, pushing at the sheet on his chest as if he could escape. "I want…I want…"

"I am sorry Ed, but you have to stay in here," Pinako said softly. "This is where we have things to help you, and you need some help right now." Ed cried harder with this. "Don't think about it you little bean, just let it go. You need to sleep."

"I am sorry," Ed cried, reaching to her. Pinako took his hand and bent down so she could hug it to her chest.

"I know you are sweet boy, and ain't no body mad at'cha," she whispered. "Now close your eyes, and go to sleep. You need to rest Ed. You need to rest."

Ed nearly passed out with her approved encouragement, and she left Post Surgical and almost walked straight into Alphonse who desperately wanted to ease drop and couldn't do so with any stealth.

"Alphonse," Pinako said firmly, fixing a tight gaze on the armor. "When Ed feels better you tell him this," she said, resting a hand on the armor's mammoth bicep. Doing so made her nervous, and his body was cold beneath her fingers, but surprisingly he flinched. When he had insurmountable strength, strength enough she believe he could seriously harm her without intent, it was he who buckled under her tiny flesh hand. He was affected the way he would have been if he still had a flesh body. "After you boys came over here, I went to your house and saw her." Alphonse cried out with surprise inside the armor and it echoed. "I found Trisha."

"You," Alphonse said, and he was starting to cry. She heard it in his voice, but his face was a printed stoic mask.

"She wasn't alive," Pinako said. She believed this and needed to believe this to keep her sanity. "And she wasn't right." If Trisha had been any part of what that thing was, she wasn't there when Pinako made it to the house, and of this she was certain. "If she lived, she did not live for very long." Alphonse's tiny soul began sobbing, and in many ways it sounded as if a gust of wind was passing through the metal suit. "I buried the body."

"Granny." Alphonse reaching forward with his metal hands, and Pinako wanted to step back, but kept her ground. Alphonse lifted them to her as if to touch her shoulders, but then wisely, even while crying, did not. "What am I going to do?" Alphonse whispered.

Pinako didn't understand this question. "About what boy?"

Alphonse sobbed. "Everything."

Pinako considered. He was a child and needed a child's answer. He needed reassurance and hope, and she gave it to him the best she could. "You let me worry about that," she said softly. "You hear?" she gave his arm a brief pat, and took his hands back. "You let me worry all about that." She gave him the brightest smile she could muster, considering. "I'll carry that weight for you Alphonse." Until they could take it back, she brought it to her own shoulders, and it was heavy. "For you and your brother."

* * *

Yes, that was chapter two.

*Smiles, *Spill it all into the review box, I can't wait to hear your thoughts on this.

Chapter 3: _Candle Flame Scrubbing_, will be up Friday 01/24/14. This is our first and only two week break. Hope to see you there.


	3. Candle Flame Scrubbing

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* * *

The Big Bang Theory  
Chapter Three  
_Candle Flame Scrubbing_

- mirage-

Two weeks after the Elrics showed up at the Rockbell home half dead and moved themselves in, Winry was put in charge of calculating both the direct cost of Ed's care, and the indirect cost of him closing Rockbell Automail while he recovered.

Pinako had been clear, with Alphonse in a suit of armor, and Ed a mutilated corpse, they couldn't risk the foreign traffic and disease in the house. Both Elric boys were a liability to their operation. With Ed just regaining color and the strength to hold conversation it was inconceivable they could have other people observing appointments, receiving care, consuming their time, or placing other open wounds near Ed's healing ones.

Ed was now a criminal of outlawed alchemy, and there was no way to explain away his condition to a trained eye. Farming accidents only went so far, and putting aside the fact Pinako didn't know of any farming accidents capable of ripping an arm and leg off an eleven year old boy without so much as laying a scratch on the rest of him, came the harsh reality that neither of them even owned a farm! _Farming accident, what farming accident? What farm? Did we lose our limbs cutting the grass?_ Likewise, Rockbell Automail could not be haunted by an unidentified set of child armor which might be misconstrued as an automail person.

"Water tank," Pinako said, addressing Alphonse. "I love ya dearly, and you know I do, so I tell you this for your own good." She spoke to Winry and Alphonse together. "You're a walking abomination now, so keeping the fact you're as empty as poor man's wallet is a secret we got ta keep. Until the day you aren't anymore, this is top priority for you."

Keeping the Elric secret would be big, for all of them. The Rockbells were either harboring phantom objects and fugitives, or they weren't, and Pinako decided they were going to claim ignorance and stick to it. As far as she was concerned her grandsons, or her nephews, however you wanted to look at it, were home from Dublith: End of story.

To keep this secret, they couldn't have inquisitive strangers at the house, and had to cancel the two automail appointments they had scheduled for that month. Politely Pinako tried to encourage them to wait until Rockbell Automail's calendar could accommodate them, but most people seeking limbs were done with waiting, and they lost almost six hundred cens in the course of an hour. Winry was left crunching numbers on two pads of paper to make sure they would have enough to cover parts they had already ordered, basic living supplies, and of course, all the medication they would consume caring for Ed.

This was a daunting task, and scrolling arithmetic for almost three hours while occasionally peppering in loud exclamations of, "there goes the Christmas fund!" Winry grew bored and used red pistachio shells to stain her lips a bright color red. Curious, she rubbed the shell across her lips to gain a bit of color before eating the nut inside. What she managed was a shade Pinako said would make the good lord question her devotion. Pinako demanded Winry wash it off, but the color was lasting. It held strong through lunch, several soapy rags, Winry's shower, and even the nervous sucking of her bottom lip when late afternoon arrived and Pinako went to Post Surgical to give Ed care.

Standing barefoot in a simple yellow sun dress Winry had her lips pinched in and was scrubbing at them with her tongue while watching Pinako intently to understand what they were doing. She hadn't been told yet, and she was starting to grow nervous with suspicion this was done on purpose.

In Post Surgical Lavatory One, Pinako was kneeling alongside the tub with her hand under the running tap. She was preparing the room and had taken out several towels and moved aside the canvas "lift" hammock used to raise, lower, and hold immobile patients in the tub. The fact that Pinako pressed it aside like a shower curtain, but was still filling the tub told Winry two things: Ed was having a bath, and he was going into the bathtub.

"Grandma?" Winry asked. "Why do you keep doing this to me?" She felt like a peeping-tom. Ed was more a grandson in the Rockbell home than he was a patient, and this domestic variable was something Winry couldn't get past. Winry lowered her voice in a pleading tone and said, "Granny, this is Ed we're talking about." _She was positive she did not want to be involved in his hygiene._ "He's not a normal patient."

Pinako grunted skeptically without looking up. "Looks like a normal patient."

Winry squealed with frustration. "You know what I mean!"

Pinako gave a heavy sigh and turned to the girl. "What do you want me to say?" she asked. "That I like how things are going? That I agree with them?" She did in fact not agree with them. In many ways she felt isolated with the rough estimate of days they would be without business. This late in life she needed to prepare for the years when she would be unable to work, not take unnecessary holiday. "I don't like it Winry," Pinako said honestly. "But this isn't about liking it, and this isn't about enjoying it. This is about doing what has to be done." Winry began shaking her head. She was not ready for this. She was not ready to be a full nurse maid to her friend. "Winry!" Pinako snapped. _This argument was growing old._ "There are only two of us!" These were the facts. "I need your help. Our routine requires two. Isn't this what you're learning to do, girl?"

Pinako felt a twinge of guilt as she lay on the pressure. Winry was a good apprentice, but appropriately she was a novice care giver, developing engineer, and amateur surgeon granted viewing privileges only. Ed was turning their practice into a trauma unit, and even if granted the preliminary steps to evaluate his healthy body, brief him on what to expect and how to best respond and communicate, they were outmatched. Rockbell Automail never would have admitted him as a patient given the choice, and Pinako knew Winry felt the devastation of their handicap as they pushed forward breaking new ground. _It was the blind leading the blind. _

They were just as scared as the boys.

Rattled to her core Pinako grasped firmly to the commitment they had no time for the luxury of fear, and so would give none. She was going to drive forward, unrelenting, and drag Winry with her. They were going to succeed because the alternative was not only the temporary handicap of Edward's missing limbs, it was the ramifications of his improper treatment, and she didn't think she could stand watching Trisha's eldest crushed.

Winry was naturally empathetic, and so the girl looked not only sad, but sorry she was not rising to the occasion when she muttered a soft, "He's not…acting like the rest of them." _Wasn't this the god's honest. _Ed's child body was suffering greatly and it was hard to watch. He was spontaneous. Automail textbooks held blank pages when it came to Ed. "I was thinking…" Winry said, bottom lip slipping from her mouth red as a rose. "…it's…" the word she didn't speak was: _awkward_. "…and…I could…sit this out?"

Pinako took a new approach. "What are you going to do in the future?" Winry cringed with the scrutiny. "Turn away those who make you uncomfortable?" Pinako gave a mocking shrug of her shoulders. "I am sure you could, I'll give you the business just the same, but you know what that will do to the Rockbell name. You know what type of reputations those mechanics have." Winry gave her eyes a tight squeeze, she didn't want to walk that path, but her determination not to did not make caring for Ed easier! _Couldn't she just skip this one thing? This one time?_ Pinako could see Winry's heated mental debate, and pushed harder. "Edward's body is no different from any other boys. He does everything the same as the lot of 'em." Pinako grabbed a towel and pushed to her feet.

"Yes but!" Winry cried, beginning an adamant shake of her head. Pinako turned off the tub water and walked to the open lavatory door. "But it is to me!" Pinako ignored this. "Granny! It is to me!"

"If you're suggesting we simply not bathe him Winry, you're going to have to do better than that," Pinako said, leaving the room.

She went to Ed's bed and laid a hand on his forehead feeling for fever. She had his medication doses running in the morning and evening, so mid afternoon he could try to surface from his drug induced fog. In their language Ed was two weeks old, and that meant he was better than he was that stormy night, but far from anywhere near good health.

Lovingly Pinako stroked her hand back into Ed's hair and spoke to him. "Ed, you coming around yet?" It was almost three o'clock, and Ed had been non responsive all morning, before reacting to basic light and sound just past noon. "He's going to come around," Pinako said, looking to Winry who stood in the lavatory doorway growing wide-eyed with the anticipation of what was about to be done. "While we get him up, don't let Alphonse get in here," she said firmly. "Keep that tin can someplace else, he's nearly uncontrollable with Ed like this."

"He doesn't like it when Ed can't speak," Winry said, looking sympathetic.

Alphonse became irrationally concerned when Ed did things which failed to resemble what a normal cognitive person would do. Ed's bouts of what they called, 'awake-time,' were not periods without intense medication. If Ed spoke it was slow, often slurred, and sometimes backwards, or with the wrong words inserted. Hearing a person speak backwards was disturbing. Ed sounded demonically possessed, and he frightened Winry badly the first time he did so.

Sitting up in bed, with his body swaying as if drunk, and his eyes half open, he had turned to her and suddenly let loose a string of what Pinako was now calling: gobble-dee-gook. He was awake enough to understand Winry was alongside the bed, and must have believed he was speaking to her because he reached out to her. Winry slapped his hand, and at the top of her lungs in her shrill child way, screamed out, "_Stop it, Ed!_"

In all her years Pinako had never witnessed phonetic reversal, but she had read about it, and quickly reassured the children that's all it was. She believed human trauma was the motherhood of survival, and if Ed was smart enough to somehow craft human transmutation while still carrying some of his baby teeth, she wasn't surprised he was reversing their language while drunk on antibiotics and pain meds. Humans were one of the most resourceful species on the planet, and the human body was made to equal the mind's ingenuity to endure. Ed didn't know where he was, and couldn't make sense of his world, Pinako believed this, and so when he spoke backwards, in a sad way, it made sense.

Pinako did not tell the children what Ed's daily exams revealed, and instead gave them vague answers, saying always, he was getting better. Using some of her automail forms Pinako kept record of Ed's treatment, and Winry did not object when Pinako asked her to stay out of it. Winry was embarrassed with Ed's personal information, the way she was indifferent to that of standard patients. So Pinako was able to easily document the fact she knew Ed was blind for at least four days without reporting it to the children. During this period she was frantically switching medication to determine what would have disrupted his eyesight, and Winry was furious with the constant changes, but oblivious to the greater threat.

Like almost all automail surgeons, Rockbell Automail crafted and produced several medications, and the most powerful and most dangerous were labeled to end in the phrase 'phine,' an automail code. By day seven all of Ed's 'phine' medication had been removed and swapped for weaker more frequent dosages. Winry also disagreed with this, fretting over Ed's liver and kidneys, and constantly tapping a stethoscope about his stomach with worry. She said they were going to rot out Ed's insides, and she was right, but Pinako found this a bit more tolerable than rotting out his eyes.

On today, the fourteenth day, Ed was not as pain stricken as he had been thirteen days ago. He woke every day, although so incredibly fatigued he was rarely himself. Patting Ed's cheek and tousling his hair, Pinako began trying to wake him. She was determined today he would leave the bed for a bath. It was a short simple act, and one she thought he could physically handle. Mentally would be another question, but lying in a constant state of wavering filth with no sense of time or date, she though the act of having a bath might be the monumental step he needed.

It took several minutes of Pinako's badgering for Ed's eyes to open with dilated pupils to stare upwards unseeing. Ed woke incredibly slowly and Pinako maintained a level of touch on his body while waiting for him. She pet his head, rubbed his chest, poked his nose, and was playing with the tip of his right ear when his eyes slowly moved to capture her.

"Hello Ed," Pinako said kindly. "Do you feel like moving?"

Ed's body had two healing incisions, and in his shoulder alone were seventy-two stitches. Seventy-two stitches were not a thing you wanted to move, so when Ed understood her he always refuted. Up until this moment the act of moving defined Pinako shifting Ed's position or getting a rag under him to wipe his skin, so she gave no hint as to her new intentions.

"Ed," Pinako said again. "Feel like moving?" Ed closed his eyes and gave his head two slow back and forth shakes. "Oh, come on Ed," Pinako teased. "You'll like it." He didn't respond to this. "You like moving, want to give it a try?" With his eyes still closed he tightened his expression into a frown. His body was exhausted with the healing process, and this slow and limited communication was often all they got. "Well, we're going to get you up," Pinako said, lifting her voice to an optimistic tone. She hooked her finger under his chin and tipped his face to her. "Ed," she snapped her fingers before his closed eyes and they cracked. "Come on Ed, you have to wake up a bit more," she whispered. "Listen to my voice, and wake up now. I need you to talk." She took his blankets to his waist to change the temperature on his skin and he responded, licking his lips and keeping one eye cracked. His mouth moved slightly, and a soft whisper, perhaps the pronunciation of a single letter slurred out, but that was it.

Pinako glanced to Winry, but the girl was catatonic with suspense.

"Ed, you're taking a bath," Pinako announced flatly. "You're covered in sweat. As good as my care is, a soapy rag only goes so far." This was the truth. She bathed him every day, but his body took war on hygiene. His wounds were leaking until early that week, keeping his bandages rank and hard to manage. Even without a fever he was constantly sweating, she wasn't sure why, and had to assume it was in response to something new he was taking. This kept him glazed with perspiration, and his hair just couldn't be thoroughly cleaned in bed. The roots were shiny and stringy with grease. "I am sick of looking at your hideous little self," Pinako said. "You smell." The medication gave him an odor, coming out through his pores, seeping out through his mouth. It wasn't overly repelling, but it wasn't inviting, and it didn't smell like a healthy person.

Life for Ed now, was brief moments where he was crying with pain, puking onto his body, or feeling overwhelming humiliation and grief while Pinako gave him intimate care.

During the first week, Ed's condition was intolerable. He suffered fevers and chills round the clock. His stomach would push up its contents, and he couldn't take care of himself. He would vomit however he could, drenching himself with it. He was sick, badly sick. At death's door, and that's not a thing many people witness. It was not something Rockbell Automail was used to witnessing. Intense preparation and study kept patients from slipping anywhere near what was happening to Ed. His body had been hacked into, sawed apart, and left open to the world. When the bleeding in his limbs was under tight control, they thoroughly cleaned them and were shocked to find dust and grains of filth from Alphonse's metal shell rubbed into Ed's raw susceptible wounds. Infection was minimal, and they attacked it fiercely, but it were as if someone had scrubbed a floor with his shoulder as a blood mop.

Pinako waited to see if Ed would argue against her announcement, but he didn't. Again she looked over to Winry, and Winry gave her head a single shake and said quickly, "I think he should stay in bed."

Pinako gave a heavy sigh and began a quick polishing scrub on Ed's chest to get his attention. "You need to wake up Ed, I know you're tired, but wake up." Resting was important for healing, but lying motionless had its own dangers, and they were starting to rear their head. "We need to have you up more, understand?" Pinako had decided earlier, while reading Winry's calculation Ed was costing them hundreds, and cursing like a sailor, that Ed was going to be getting up more. _No more of this dragging our feet._

Ed did not look awake, but he was, and softly he muttered a faint, "Okay."

Pinako was not impressed. Ed was a brave liar, and told her what she wanted to hear to sate her into shutting up and leaving him alone. He did this while healthy, and he sure as hell did it now.

"Ed, you're going in the tub," Pinako said, plowing on ahead.

Ed turned his expression into sleepy disagreement. "No," Ed croaked. He had been awake for a few bed baths, and though he couldn't understand them, he knew enough to fear touch. _Touch hurt: BADLY. _ His breathing began to increase with anxiety. "I…don't think...I…need…a bath."

"Respectfully, I disagree," Pinako said, verifying the head of Ed's feeding tube was capped by running her finger over the two-prong tube poking into his nose. At night she uncapped it, and while he slept dripped the Rockbell concoction down the tubes leading into his stomach to keep him healthy.

Ed discovered his feeding tube yesterday while awake enough to touch his nose. It scared him when he found it and when he tried to pull it out. It was the patient's instinctive response. When something foreign was found, rip it off, but this was never the wise decision. Pinako had been sewing a replacement apron for herself in the living room when she heard this happen. Ed called to Alphonse sharply, telling Alphonse in a slow rasped tone that there was something in his nose. Alphonse knew. He had watched, with his metal face frozen and expressionless, when they inserted it, and he told Ed what it was. Alphonse watched Ed eat every night and Pinako had even given the boy a quick 101 on the set up so he could get her if something went wrong. So far nothing had.

"I am…" Ed said. Pinako was surprised he was so talkative. "…taking…a bath?" he sounded curious, as if this might be the first bath he'd ever had, before suddenly remembering life, and correcting himself with a quick, "no."

Pinako lifted Ed's sheet and placed a towel over him before taking if off. "You'll like a bath Ed."

"No."

Carefully Pinako tucked Ed's towel down about his chest. "Ed, your catheter needs to be disconnected and plugged so water doesn't go where you don't want it."

"No." Ed choked a sound of embarrassment with his face turning red. He responded as if he had a food allergy, and his expression strained. After Alphonse explained Ed's feeding tube, he told Ed he had a second one, and Ed reached down and groped at himself with disbelieving terror. He was horrified when he felt something leading into his penis, and managed to become hideously angry even while so tired. He demanded it be taken out, but Pinako refused. Even half-alive Edward Elric was not an idiot, and switched tactics to begging for it to be taken out. When Pinako still refused he tried to himself. He managed one laughable tug, and the resulting sting on his irritated and stretched urethra, had him very scared of his catheter being touched. Directly after ordering Pinako to take it out, he switched to insisting he wanted it in.

"Don't," Ed croaked. "Don't…take it out. I…don't need…a bath."

Pinako smiled when she heard worn out panic enter Ed's tone. It meant he was returning to true alertness. It made him human. She did not like the soulless medicated version of him any less than Alphonse. The Edward look-a-like doll that did nothing and had no opinion of what happened around him or to his own body made them all uneasy. Pinako wanted him angry, she wanted him prodded and irritated into living, and although she had not shared this with Winry, she planned to be the deliberate thorn in Ed's side that kept him on his toes so he had a place to stand.

"You do need a bath," Pinako said. With Winry's view obstructed, she flipped the bottom of Ed's towel up onto his stomach so she could access his catheter.

Ed squirmed immediately. "No…wait!" He reached down to his pelvis with his flesh hand. "I…want…need…"

Pinako was slipping into rubber gloves as he babbled, and she knocked his hand aside before he could reach himself. "Don't grab at'cha self Ed, you'll get an infection with that in there."

"I need…a little…privacy!" Ed cried, waking up. He was aware of the temperature change on his hips, and lifted his flesh leg in a gesture that said he meant to cover himself, but it was too weak to be successful. "I need privacy," he said, regaining some strength to his voice, and managing a faster rate of speech. "I need that, I…need some, I need that," he insisted, whining sloppily.

Pinako ignored Ed's protests and carefully disconnected the tip of the catheter's interior tubing from the external. It extended forward from the head of Ed's penis two inches, and she capped it so Ed could become mobile without the internal part having to be removed or reinserted later. They had designed their catheter this way to accommodate procedure scheduling.

"You have plenty of privacy Ed." Pinako patronized him on purpose, speaking in a foolishly sarcastic tone to irritate him. Ed still wasn't awake enough to become fully angry, but he was coming closer. "You and me are going to be getting to know each other better. There's no one here but me to take care of you, and until you can do it again for yourself, you best just let some of your pride go."

Pinako tossed part of Ed's towel onto his face to blind him. It would take him a moment to coordinate and pull it off, and in the mean time she dabbed the side of his numbed severed thigh with antiseptic and filled a small needle with something to help clear his head. He didn't like injections, and she gave him the mercy of ignorance.

Ed reached up to the towel on his face whining miserably and curled it into his grasp. Softly, from beneath it he muttered out, "My pride?" Like a telephone with a poor connection he was seconds behind the conversation.

"We'll give you lots of your meds orally now Ed, how does that sound" Pinako asked, scrubbing the injection site with a second antiseptic wipe. Ed pulled the towel off his face at an infant's speed and was frowning underneath. "I betcha you'll like that."

"No," Ed said, failing to grasp the topic, but responding argumentatively. "No, I don't like that."

"You do like that, Pinako teased, slipping her arms under him. The back of his neck was a swamp, and the backs of his legs were no better. "Let's get'cha in the tub." Pinako hoisted him quickly, at an angle to keep his weight on his shoulders, and against her body. With his thigh severed above the knee carrying him was difficult. In her arms he was a hot sticky bundle.

Ed panicked with the motion and shook once, fast. He released a few brief unsettled noises, but his exhaustion kept his distress silent and he began fidgeting. The sensation of being carried was foreign at his age, and while life in bed was not pleasant it was predictable. Ed would take predictable over painful in a heartbeat. When Pinako lifted Ed, powerful apprehension filled his stomach with lead, and made him feel powerless to prevent what might happen to himself. Though there was little he had tried to avert, he knew he was not the king of this castle. Pinako had held this role before in his life. She was the caretaker, and her rules were law. She would comfortably exercise authority without hesitation if she felt it was in his best interest, and had always done so in the past. Ed had learned to do what she asked of him or face the consequences.

Pinako was a sensible woman, so this wasn't much, a chore here or there, help with seasonal canning, and common good behavior. She was reasonable, and even at Ed's age he understood she loved him and took good care of him and Alphonse, but that wasn't enough to overcome the resulting dread of her picking him up. If grandma said he was taking a bath, he knew that meant he was. Missing two limbs, and barely able to keep himself sitting up in bed, he wasn't sure how this would happen.

Pinako carried Ed past Winry, and Winry broke out whining. She remained in the lavatory threshold wanting to escape, and begged a small pleading, "_Grandma!_"

Ed flinched with Winry's voice, and immediately looked for her. "Where is Winry?" he asked. Pinako knelt alongside the tub, and the drop in height brought a statue Winry into Ed's view. "What's doing—what's doing—she, she in here!" Ed cried, before correcting himself. "What's she doing in here!" He clutched at the towel on his chest. "Winry, get out!" he ordered her, voice nasty, and cheeks beginning to blush.

"You hush up," Pinako said, giving Ed a tiny jostle to scold his yelling. Ed lifted his gaze to Pinako with immediate surprise. "You think I have hands for everything? I am just one old lady, skilled that I am."

Ed was silent with a look of extreme disagreement as he processed what Pinako said. Then it hit home and he grew a look of outrage and said, "Are you nuts?" Ed turned his gaze back to Winry, and he ordered her with a tone full of authority. "Winry get out, you're not staying in here, I want you to get away from me! Go away!"

Winry stiffened with offense, but didn't move.

Pinako was stunned with Ed's behavior; it was oil on water. With her hand in the bath water she looked down him. His rising anger had him beginning to squirm and while this was shocking Pinako took full advantage of it. She wanted him to move his body, and whatever motivated him she would use. Deliberately Pinako shifted her weight so Ed would have a clear view of Winry, and he escalated further.

Ed was coming into full swing. His wit was blooming and it made him sassy. Adding Winry's bubble bath to the tub Pinako began laughing to herself as Ed chewed Winry out with commands and statements that were so sloppy Winry didn't even argue back. It wasn't until Ed became intimidated with Winry's silence, and began yelling for Alphonse that Pinako groaned.

The last thing she wanted was Alphonse involved, but forbidding the boy free access to Ed's room caused him to cry.

"I can't do this!" Ed said, breaking into a labored frantic rate of breath. "I am going to be sick. I can't go in there like this! What about my bandages! I can't do this!"

"Ed, stop working yourself up," Pinako scolded, mixing the water quickly with her hand to spread the bubbles evenly. "Your bandages are made to endure, you'll be fine. You want a sponge bath then?"

Ed cringed deeply and went dangerously close to tears. "_No_," he whined. From the hall the sudden banging of pots and pans became audible as Alphonse approached to answer Ed's call.

Pinako rolled her eyes. "Good lord, everything is a production with you Edward."

"Nii-san?" Alphonse appeared, and Winry backed out of Alphonse's way looking even more concerned and guilt ridden.

"Alphonse, get out!" Pinako said. "I am giving your brother a proper bath." She waved dramatically at the armor, telling it to leave.

Ed began telling on them, referring to them collectively as "crazy women" and Alphonse followed Ed's pointing hand to Winry. Even as a genderless metal body Alphonse seemed surprised, and said, "Granny, you can't let Winry stay in here, right?" Alphonse also pointed at Winry and the girl snatched a wash cloth and covered her face in embarrassment. She held it up like a tiny curtain she could hide behind, and Pinako felt isolated as the only adult. "Right?" Alphonse asked. "Winry's a girl."

"Well thank you for stating the obvious Alphonse," Pinako said dryly. She found this bickering intolerable. They couldn't have an out-an-out four person discussion on the manner in which they were administering care every time she decided to do something. Her two person routine was being sabotaged and reduced to one person amateur techniques!

"If we keep this nonsense up the only person to pay for it is the patient, and for now that's Ed," Pinako said angrily. A two person routine reduced to one cut care on the patient, period. To be blunt about things, the last thing she wanted to do was cause her skinny rat of an adopted grandson more pain. Winry had participated in automail surgery and recovery for months. She had tended to many clients of both genders, and now Edward's introduction alone was destroying everything the girl had learned. Pinako found it as mind-boggling as it was frustrating. "Now Alphonse, get'cha metal butt out and let me work, you're making my life difficult."

Alphonse broke into nonsense whining, and Ed followed. In the midst of it Ed called Winry a stupid useless girl, and Winry jumped at this.

"I am not a stupid useless girl, Edward! I know what I am doing!" As embarrassed as she was, she was compelled to defend her skills.

"Get away from me Winry! I don't care!" Ed yelled.

"Don't call me useless!"

"Go away! Get away from me!"

Through it all Alphonse never stopped talking, and Pinako raised her voice over all of them and said, "All right!" They silenced. _She couldn't take this._ "Everyone out, and stay out!" Winry ran, abandoning them without hesitation and Pinako was shocked. "Winry, dammit! Don't go far in case I need to call for you!" The girl looked as if she were heading for the hills.

Alphonse was lumbering his way back out the narrow doorway when Winry returned, squeezed by his thigh like a mouse, and pushed every bath product into reach before fleeing. It was obvious she didn't want to be called for anything, and Pinako laughed.

Alphonse left and shut the door with a vicious frame rattling slam, and the abrupt silence in the chaotic room was felt.

Pinako lowered her gaze to Ed and gave a heavy sigh. His exhaustion made his eyes seem like small craters in his face. The skin was dark, and the lids swollen. The drain of his blood had bleached the color from his skin, and he was pale and almost waxy looking in his filth. Silently, they looked at each other. "Are you happy now Bean?" she asked, kindly.

Ed was limp with fatigue but his face was sullen. "I'd be happier if you left me some dignity." Ed returned his flesh hand to his face and rubbed at it in stress before covering his eyes. Below his palm the tubing in his nose caught the light.

"I had planned to," Pinako said, with pointed optimism. Ed parted his fingers and peeked up at her. "Listen to me now Ed," she said, lowering her voice into a whisper. "You can't change what's going to happen, because you can't change what happened. All you can do is grow stronger because of it. What's happening now, let's talk about that Bean. You're having a bath." Ed shivered with dread. "You're going to take your towel off, and you're going to be naked. It doesn't bother me, this is my job, I do it with lots of people, and by the time you're well, you'll look back at this and find it hard to belief something so stupid was ever so hard." Ed's expression sunk with dark skepticism this would be the case. "That's what's going to happen today," Pinako said, slowing down to make sure he was following her, "and it's going to happen tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that." Ed's look of stressful opposition dipped into horror. "You need to think of this as a transition Edward, because that's what it is." She leaned a bit closer. These words were only for him. There was a part of recovery that was special to each patient, and it was nobody's business. "I will give you the dignity of making each choice yourself, and I will give you the dignity of as much time to make that choice as I can possibly allow."

"Well, what if I said I don't want a bath, why don't you listen to that then, huh?" Ed asked, unconvinced and stalling.

"You're like my grandson," Pinako said, brushing Ed's comment aside. "Ed, I used to bathe you when you were just a little thing, smaller than you are even now."

"I am not your child," Ed said, anger rising. His expression was tense with miserable discomfort, and he looked desperate for an argument he was certain he wouldn't find. "I am not small, and I am too old to be bathed."

"Not in this condition you're not, and I know that's hard for you to hear." Pinako lifted Ed to the rim of the tub so he could see the water and bubbles. "I put Winry's bubbles in there for you." Ed looked at them sourly. "Now I ain't gonna undress you. You have one arm so there's no reason to be lazy with it." Pinako paused, granting Ed time to think.

Ed was stiff in Pinako's arms. He closed his eyes as if fiercely meditating, and a long minute of silence lapsed before Pinako spoke. "Ed?"

"Just give me a minute," Ed snapped, gritting his teeth and enduring his demons. His hand was clenching and releasing the towel on his chest for several seconds, before he stopped, and abruptly tossed it off himself.

It was an act of bravado, but without cover Ed physically recoiled, squeezing his eyes tighter, and turning to stone where he lay. At his side his flesh hand was twitching softly, struggling to maintain composure and resist the strong urge to cover himself.

Pinako felt the corner of her mouth twitch up with satisfaction. _His stubborn perseverance would get him through this._

"You're a cute little thing Ed," she said, voice full of affection.

He retaliated immediately. "I am not little and cute!" Pinako carefully extended her arms over the side of the tub and lowered Ed to the water. He was nervous, but continuing his argument until he touched the surface. "Don't call me little!" then he gasped loudly and pushed at her arm, as if to escape. "It's hot!" he cried. "It's too hot!"

Pinako ignored this, and dipped him in. "Quiet boy," she said. "It's not too hot, shut'cha mouth." Ed gave a loud hiss as she submerged him past his shoulders and held him in the water. "You're going to come to like warm water Ed," Pinako said kindly. "You're going to come to like baths." Carefully she set him down on the bottom and moved him into a sitting position with the greatest care. Their tub was specially made to be deep, wide, rounded, and polished. It was slick so they could move patients without their skin dragging, but the side effect was a slippery interior lined with small support rails, grips, and several metal loops used for different types of equipment.

As Ed came to realize he was sitting, he looked around himself and became unsettled with the foreign items.

"Stay still Ed," Pinako cautioned. "These things are to help you, but you can't catch yourself with one hand. The best thing for you to do is close your eyes and relax in the water." She took a washcloth and wet it. Everything was easily in reach. _Clever Winry._

Ed was adjusting to the warm water as if it were lulling him back to sleep and he was immediately more at ease with the water line on his chest and all of him beneath the white sheet of bubbles. Silently he watched Pinako work, for the moment, with only one hand herself. She never removed the arm looped behind his back, and she laid out two wet washcloths and drizzled soap onto both of them.

"Have you done this to a lot of people?" Ed asked.

Pinako chuckled. "Most of our patients get bed baths because I can't carry them about." Ed was disgusted with this. "They're not that bad." Pinako tossed a washcloth to Ed. It hit the bubbles soundlessly and Ed looked at it. "With one arm and one leg, you can't hold yourself up and wash yourself at the same time," she said, stating the obvious. "So this will be our routine: You wash everything below the water line, and I'll wash everything above it, but you better actually wash yourself. If you want me to close my eyes just say so, but I can't ever leave you. There is no way you could pull yourself up if you went under."

Ed lowered his gaze to his washcloth. It was rocking slightly in the bubbles. He needed time to digest these unpleasant words. He was accepting his situation slowly, like every other victim: unwillingly, and one step at a time. Pinako was gracious, and gave him time to do so.

Ed felt swallowed up by the white sterile world which had come out and trapped him like a prisoner. There was the basement, there was mom, and then suddenly this. Everything which had been, now wasn't. In losing two limbs he had lost all of them. His legs, his arms, one limb did not grant function. He couldn't stand, he couldn't balance, he couldn't pull the covers up or push them off all at once. Sitting in the bath water, staring outward as if looking through a body he didn't own, the white medical lavatory smelled of disinfectants and his own defeat. The room was made for the handicapped, with support rails on the walls, a taller than usual sink, and wider than usual toilet, and because he was in it, it was made for him, and because it was made for him, it meant he was handicapped.

Pinako gave Ed more time to think than any patient she could remember. _It wasn't her custom to sit motionless holding people in the tub._ Ed was deathly still with the situation, and she wanted him to take it without choking, but quickly he was beginning to look worse. The sockets of his swollen eyes were moving from a tea brown to a bruising yellow and black with his stress. Eerily it looked as if his body were rusting in on the only part of his soul left.

"It's okay Ed," Pinako whispered, breaking him from his spell. She feared that blackness spreading over him and shutting out the light. Sealing him inside where like a candle flame, he would smother.

Ed's eyes leapt to Pinako, and his expression was strained as if listening intently. "How long..." Ed began softly. "…do you think I'll need to recover fr—" Pinako dipped her washcloth and brought it to Ed's shoulder. He startled badly when the rag touched him, losing speech as if slapped.

Pinako gave only a slight pause, and then continued. With extreme care she rubbed pointlessly at the tip of his healthy shoulder, so he could experience her touch and the sensation of the washcloth. It was important he understand bathing was not dangerous to himself. She didn't want him to fear being wiped with a rag, or being washed, and that meant you took things slow and friendly.

Ed stared at the bubbles as Pinako washed his shoulder before peeking up at her. "…from this?" he finished his question. "How long do you think…I'll need to recover from this?"

"About a few weeks," Pinako said flatly.

Ed was horrified. "Maximum?"

"I expect that to be rather standard. That's not a maximum at all." Pinako rubbed the washcloth onto Ed's neck, but he stiffened, and yanked his face away.

"This is really upsetting me," Ed said quickly, voice growing tight as if his throat were constricting. He went stiff, breath escalating, before swallowing roughly. "Can I have Alphonse inside?" Pinako felt her jaw set tightly, the way it did when she endured the hardest moments of life. Ed was still talking to her, but she was lost in a memory of Trisha bathing a little boy in her kitchen sink as if he were an eggplant. With soap she would playfully pull Ed's fuzz of infant hair upward into a point, and laugh and coo at him. As a child, Edward had always liked water, and when he was three Trisha would fill the Elric bathtub slowly so he could stand stomping in it and laughing to himself. When he was inside, the only person over the rim was mom, and Pinako felt like a stain. A glaring error of a replacement. Ed was living a routine he had only shared with Trisha and it was forcing the cruel reality of life into his face: MOM WAS DEAD.

_You verified that, didn't you Ed._

The circle hadn't revived her. It had attacked them, hungrily sucking Alphonse into its black squid beak mouth with the boy screaming. The younger brother, the second son, he was the first of them to recognize what was happening for what it was: _something terrible._ Something unthinkable. Ed remembered the building wind, and the sinking feeling of danger. It came suddenly, as if something else appeared in the room, and the sensation grew like a sound rising in volume until it was almost deafening. He was certain, although many details were hazy, he had not truly become afraid until Alphonse had screamed, because it was a sound Ed had never heard his brother make.

"Ed?" Pinako reached in front of Ed's face and snapped her fingers. "Snap out of it," she said angrily. Ed had suddenly begun staring off at nothing, as if his mind were fading away. It was spooky. As if he could evaporate out of himself, and revert back into that indifferent drooling doll.

Ed jerked with the action so close to him, and woke from the trance he had slipped into.

"What were you looking at?" Pinako asked, tone accusatory.

Ed mentally returned to the lavatory, and shifted uncomfortably. There was the basement, mom, this room, and now this bath. Ed squirmed as much as he was able. "I want to get out now," Ed said, whining.

"Ed, what life has in store for you will be much harder than one bath with your grandmother," Pinako teased. With care she rubbed the washcloth over his neck and scrubbed away the dried sweat and lingering scent of vomit. So weak his body teetered with the delicate pressure of her hand, and it made holding his head a chore. "Right now the only people in this room are you and me. Alphonse and Winry, they don't have to see this side of things." Pinako dipped the cloth into the tub to rinse it and Ed shivered with distaste. _Despite Ed's demons, and her demons, this still needed to be done. The world wasn't stopping for them._

"This coming from the old bat who wanted to have Winry in here," Ed said sourly. His voice was tense and almost shaking. It was threatening to break into tears at any moment.

Pinako tried to ignore how badly it pained her heart to hear it. She dropped the washcloth down Ed's neck and back, and he wiggled immediately. "Stay out of the water line!" he yelled.

"You can't scrub your own back," Pinako said, washing large circles around his shoulders and lumbar. "This is Winry's career Edward. This is what she's going to do, and be damned lucky it is. Where else would you be getting care if we weren't all set up for it?" She stopped washing and Ed turned to her. His mouth was cranked down painfully, and his eyes were red rimmed with torment. "I am teaching her everything I know, and every patient endures her. She's no different from me."

"She's my friend!" Ed cried, eyes rushing with tears. "I can't be naked around her, it's weird!" Ed shook his head. "That's not fair! _It's not fair!_"

Pinako brushed Ed's bangs from his face with a wet hand. She gave a heavy sigh and said, "I know boy." She moved the washcloth to his chest and began washing carefully. "I'll do what I can, I promise." Under her hand she could feel him breathing, and although the strength of his chest rising was meager, it was real, and she felt a burst of unexpected happiness. Growing a pleased smile she gave him a small nudge, and he looked to her.

Pinako moved her gaze to Ed's floating washcloth and he followed it. Without speaking or looking up he took it and began scrubbing at his good thigh. "These bubbles make it easier for you?" Pinako asked. Ed's face tightened uncomfortably. "Tell me, or I won't waste Winry's things."

"Yes," Ed said quickly. "Yes." He closed his eyes. "I always want the bubbles."

Pinako smiled. Edward was adapting better than she'd anticipated. What minor youth automail the Rockbell name had performed since Winry became involved did not have dilapidated child patients in the house needing this level of care. As one old woman Pinako just wouldn't allow it. The procedures they took on never removed the parent or child from the child home. So Ed was entirely new, and the fact he was a close family friend just an odd double-edged sword.

"Look away for a second," Ed said, angrily. Pinako took his washcloth and added more soap. "How often do I have to take baths?" Ed asked miserably. Pinako gave a contemplative sigh working his cloth into lather before handing it back. "Look away, okay!"

Politely Pinako obliged, turning her head to an extreme to exaggerate his privacy.

After a moment of washing Ed asked again, "How often?" then he threw the washcloth to the other side of the tub looking disgusted.

"As often as you need 'em," Pinako said dryly. "Now shut ya eyes and hold ya breath, you're going under." Ed looked worried. "Believe me Ed," Pinako teased. "I didn't spend all that time stitching you closed just to drown you." She wrapped her arm about his shoulders, with the crook of her elbow behind his head for support. Immediately, with only that slight touch, his weight slid off balance and sunk dependently onto her. This startled him. Ed's hand shot out and grabbed the front of her dress to secure himself. He brought a splash of water with him, and Pinako pulled her head to the side, but otherwise didn't move. When she looked back Ed was staring up at the wet stain of his hand curled into her dripping collar looking uncertain.

"Um…" he whispered.

Pinako dismissed this with a heavy sigh. She wasn't truly expecting to get through this dry. "Close 'em," she repeated, and he did. Ed filled his lungs puffing his cheeks out and closed his eyes. She dunked him under.

Winry knocked on the door before opening it a crack. "Grandma?" she called. "There's a delivery here."

Pinako sat Ed up quickly. "Dammit," she said. Ed was pawing at his face with his single hand. He brushed away his bangs and extra water before sputtering a few coughs. "Ed, I gotta leave you for a minute," Pinako said. "Someone's gotta stay. You want your brother?"

Ed began nodding frantically. "Yes! Yes!" Ed looked concerned anyone but Alphonse would be considered.

Pinako left Alphonse kneeling alongside the tub hanging onto Ed with the lavatory door open for extra safety. Edward was disgusted.

The Rockbells were receiving metal parts and it was rare, but essential for business. They placed orders once a year, and directly before Rush Valley's spring exhibition, where many mechanics were looking to unload parts they planned to upgrade or replace. It didn't yield much of a savings, but every penny counted when you were self-employed.

The shipment was four crates, Pinako moved them in, signed for them, and left Winry to handle the rest. She returned to Post Surgical, and when she heard the boys talking, snuck to the lavatory door and peered in.

Alphonse was trying to wash Ed's hair. With Ed sitting obediently in the water, Alphonse's massive soap covered hands were painfully raking over Ed's scalp. Constructed of metal parts and leather strips, Ed's delicate strands of hair were tangling and snarling in Alphonse's fingers and wrist joint. Unintentionally he was ripping them out, while crushing Ed's head with the graceless strength of toddler petting a rabbit.

Pinako could see Ed cringing and trying to pull his head away, but he was attached to Alphonse the way a puppeteer holds a marionette.

"Ow, ow, Alphonse," Ed whispered, wincing when Alphonse gave his hand a frantic shake to dislodge himself. "Ow!" Ed cried, gripping the side of the tub with white knuckled frustration. "You're pulling it out!"

"Sorry Nii-san, I am trying!" Alphonse gave a tug and roughly jerked Ed's head to the side. "I almost made it!" Ed became angry and reached upwards to help. The moment he was unreinforced he lost balance and slipped beneath the water.

Pinako startled, but before she could respond, Alphonse reached into the tub with the vigor of someone uprooting a turnip, and yanked Ed out so fast, and with so much unneeded strength, she doubted Ed had time to even reach the bottom.

Alphonse raised all but Ed's flesh knee from the water, wrapping his mighty hand about Ed's torso like an oven mitt. _Pinako grabbed her mouth with sudden fright_. The way Alphonse had snatched Ed, and specifically the torso being the largest part, and more specifically Ed's rib cage to find something solid and not easily crushed, scared her. Alphonse was holding Ed's body the way he might a glass, and Ed was entirely unaware of it. He was coughing excessively with his hair and bangs plastered to his face and dripping over his airways.

"Put me down!" Ed cried, hanging tight to Alphonse's arm but wiggling with discomfort. Alphonse set Ed back into the tub without a single word. "Are you trying to drown your own brother Alphonse!" Ed slumped into the tub side panting heavily. His face was locked in a tight wince, but he wasn't complaining. Pinako noticed this right away. Alphonse's violent movement had scared Ed the way it would any straight-thinking person. He only had one arm left, and Alphonse could have ripped it off with that type of strength. Ed had the unfair advantage of knowing what this actually felt like, and Pinako could see him shaking with the disorientation. Yet, Ed was silent. With his lips pressed together and his expression focused into one battling for composure. _For Alphonse, Ed was trying to keep it together._

Pinako stepped into the doorway and addressed the severity of what had just happened by ignoring it. "You two stop this goofing off," she scolded. Alphonse looked back at Pinako, and she imagined he was maybe relieved or possibly surprised to see her, but his face bore no expression. It was a metal sheet crafted into the shape of a face, turning in her direction.

"We're not goofing off," Ed said. This conversation was years old. Both Elric boys had enjoyed many fun evenings in the Rockbell farmhouse where they bathed together before bed. Hearing Pinako yelling up they better behave themselves and stop goofing off was old news.

"I washed my hair," Ed said, rubbing his wet hand over his face to clear away any lingering soap. He sounded content, before suddenly remembering the situation to be her invading on him. "Now get out!" he said, abruptly angry. "Don't stand in the doorway watching me! You're spying on me granny!"

"Ed, you're going back to bed," Pinako said.

Ed groaned out a quick sign of air, and managed a sour, "Thank god." He was trying to be a snot, but so tired, he craved his bed. He lost his tough act and broke into exhausted whining. "I just want to go back to bed, can't I just get back in bed?" Pinako ignored this. She glanced at Alphonse who consumed the lavatory like a large water heater set in the middle of the floor. "I don't want to take a bath anymore!" Ed was on a roll, and Pinako gave a large chest deflating sigh. Having Ed return to his normal vocal self was a sign of good health and something she wanted, but at the same time…

"I done with this bath! Get me out! I want to go to bed now, granny. I am so tired!"

…Ed could be rather relentless.

* * *

Curtain falls on Chapter 3, I hope you all enjoyed.

This is the beginning to life in this little farmhouse, and I know it's a smoother ride than the first heart-thudding chapters, but I hope it proved a fun one. (It won't be that smooth, I promise). Please leave your comments! You know I love them.

Chapter 4: _Ocean Row Boat, _will be up next Friday 01/31/14. Hope to see you there.


	4. Ocean Row Boat

.

* * *

The Big Bang Theory  
Chapter Four  
_Ocean Row Boat_

- mirage-

The first trip out of bed, and the strenuous activity of bathing, ate every ounce of energy Ed had stored, and he slept like the dead for the rest of the afternoon. At five Pinako tried to rouse him for food, but couldn't manage it. If he woke it was brief, lasting a few short minutes, and he could barely get out a word. She was forced to surrender, and Ed spent another night subjected to non-oral food and medication, until waking the next day late afternoon.

Alphonse was thrilled. He talked to Ed nonstop with Ed staring up at the ceiling looking morbidly detached. It was the same the next day, and even the day after that, and their opinion on what was going on began to change. Blaming Ed's developing disinterest in life on his medication seemed inferentially weak at best, and Pinako saw Winry becoming worried.

Ed didn't ask questions to learn what was going on around him, or show any interest in what was happening to his body. When he awoke in the afternoon he did so in one of two states: Recognizable and Unrecognizable.

During the bouts of his recognizable self, such as during his first bath, he was friendly, he chatted with Alphonse and looked sincerely appreciative to have Alphonse so close. He couldn't manage humor, but he could manage sass, and Pinako took this as a good sign. It was refreshing. Every day Ed's medication kept him out until, like an afternoon visitor, he woke for a few short hours, and then slipped under. The timeframe was short, and precious, but like a curse, it came with a daunting sense of uncertainty. There was no way to gauge what state Ed would be in when he opened his eyes.

During his unrecognizable bouts he was bitterly cynical, his expressions and sparse comments were gruesome, deliberately hurtful, and inappropriate. Pinako allowed this for five days, and then she decided he needed a new routine. Whatever Ed was going through, spending his days medicated, sleeping, and awake for only a few hours, wasn't helping him. He needed a radical change.

The night of the sixth day she decided firmly he would stay awake long enough to eat dinner. She'd had enough of this tube-feeding-vegetable bullshit.

* * *

Ed's food was a combination of overcooked oats, mashed blueberries, vitamin powder, mashed prunes, milk, and a careful regulation of calories. It was a wet, bitter, porridge.

Too exhausted to sit up and eat properly, Ed took his first non-tube fed meal lying in bed with a rag tucked into his neck and over his eyes being fed.

Ed was exhausted to the point moving and speaking was hard for him, but even drained to the core, he understood he was being fed like a toddler, and hated it. His mouth opened only a sliver for Pinako's reoccurring spoon, and his expression was tight with a suffering she tried to ignore.

Pinako started with just enough to wet his tongue. Ed hadn't used his mouth and throat to eat in twenty-two days, and although he had done it for years, such a duration caused it to feel different.

Ed reacted badly at first, turning his head away from the spoon, and licking questioningly at his lips. The taste felt flooding, and Pinako watched Ed suckle his flavored mouth like that of an infant. Ed was interested for the first two spoonfuls, and then he decided he didn't like what she had, didn't want it, and hated what was happening.

"Ed, eating is not optional for human beings," Pinako said dryly. Her third and fourth spoonfuls only had small bite sized amounts on the tip. They were easy to slip between Ed's lips and deposit. "Also, while you're at the Rockbells, you don't have the luxury of a hunger strike." The fifth and sixth spoonfuls were real. Pinako scooped the dark mix, wedged the spoon into Ed's mouth, and tipped it up so he had to take it.

Ed struggled. He wasn't consistently chewing and swallowing like a healthy person, he was feeling the grains of the prunes, and the skin of the blueberries as if engrossed with the sensory perception of his mouth. Pinako watched this carefully, because a person as medicated as Ed was prone to discovering normal events no longer were when your body was drugged to the hilt. Curious, Pinako let her small silver spoon trace along Ed's bottom lip after a spoonful, and it caused him to shudder.

"Your mouth feel okay, Ed?" she asked softly. She had added a pinch of sugar to the meal in hopes to better it for him, but it wasn't much.

Ed turned his face to the side and left it. In a raspy voice, as if sick with a fierce cold, he said, "I am done." He had only eaten ten spoonfuls, not even a single bowl.

Casually Pinako retorted with, "The hell you are." She tapped her spoon into the dish and gave the mix a good stir. "Open your mouth." She shoveled out a blueberry and piece of prune and brought it to Ed's lips. Ed clenched his teeth. "Open it, or I'll do it for you," Pinako said firmly. "You have to eat, and you need to give up the tube Ed. You're too healthy for it." She gave his lips a gentle bump with the spoon. "Come on." Ed's expression tightened further and Pinako gave a heavy sigh. She didn't want to force him. She couldn't. She didn't have the heart to pry his mouth open and make him eat while he was so sad.

"Ed," Pinako began. She closed her eyes and took a minute. _She was searching for a way to continue._ "I got better things to do than feed ya, don't you feel bad you're wasting my time?" She ran to sarcasm. "One spoonful isn't enough for even an ant, you saying that's what'cha need?"

Ed kept his jaw tightly clenched and Pinako sat the bowl down feeling defeated. She wasn't ready to surrender, but it sounded so appealing. "Okay you small thing," she said sweetly. She reached forward and gently rubbed his stomach. Ed startled with the unexpected touch, but then relaxed. He gave a heavy sigh and his mouth opened a sliver. Pinako reached to the spoon while continuing to rub and pushed it into his mouth.

Ed flailed as violently as if she'd just thrown at him. He shook his head, swallowing quickly to save himself from choking, and broke out panting with his head whipped to the side. He was upset with what she'd done, but drifting out so far he couldn't find it in himself to argue.

Pinako imagined him in a little row boat, bobbing out in the ocean with just a sliver of land in the horizon. He didn't have the strength to row himself back in, but more importantly, he didn't care to do so. He would die there: starve and bake in the sun.

"Ed," Pinako lowered her voice to a whisper and leaned forward to look down at him. "Ain't nothing wrong with someone feeding you." Her old wooden chair groaned with the tip in her weight. "You need to eat to have your strength." She lifted her hand to his bangs and gently brushed them from his forehead with her fingertips. "I closed the door so it's private for you, and you're recovering beautifully, Ed." She meant this as a true compliment. "I know things have been hard, but you're still moving at a much faster rate than most patients." This was only slightly true, and largely because they were unpracticed with child patients. They didn't know what the timeframes were. Ed remained silent and kept his face turned away. With love Pinako pet his cheek gently before tucking his sheet more comfortably about his chest. "What's the matter Ed?" Pinako asked, dreading his answer. "Aren't cha glad?"

Ed's voice was barely audible. In a heartbreaking tone of sadness he said, "It doesn't matter really."

Pinako immediately shook her head. _No, she did not agree with that._ "Come now, Bean." She plucked the rag off Ed's eyes but he kept them closed. "I know you're going through a lot, but we gotta get you outta this rut you're in. Aren't you excited to get out of bed and play with Alphonse?" Ed was depressed, even the children had noticed, but it was hard to decode how much of it was muddy water stirred up from Trisha. "He's been very worried about you."

Pinako sat back and recollected Ed's bowl. She stirred it thoughtfully. "I know Alphonse is excited to see you're getting better." She lifted a spoonful to Ed's line of sight. He opened his eyes when he understood something was in front of his face, but he looked at the spoon and the entire room as if it were inconsequential.

"I don't want anymore," he said softly. "Please leave me alone."

"Ed, I want cha to finish your dinner."

Ed was silent. He lifted his gaze to the ceiling and repeated, "Leave me alone."

Pinako sat the spoon back in the dish. "Ed, what's wrong with you child?" She was already moving to the decision she was going to have to address this clinically. Keeping her voice soft and caring, she asked, "Are you sad?"

"Sad?" Ed grunted bitterly. "She's dead, and Alphonse is in that armor." Ed began a soft one-person laugh. "…and now I am a cripple..." Ed's chuckling for one matured into laughter that lasted only a second. It gave way to tears almost immediately, and Pinako stared at the boy. "I think I died there." Ed cried. "I think I died in the basement."

Pinako set Ed's bowl aside quickly. Suddenly she felt like the cancer inside Ed had reared its ugly head, and she wanted to crush it before it spread any further. "You are very much alive, Edward Elric," she said, firming her voice angrily. She stood and went directly to his bedside nightstand. When in use patient night stands were stocked with applicable active and inactive medication. Ed's was heavily dominated with many small clear jars with self-made labels, cardboard boxes of pills, and fat dark brown medicinal bottles.

"Hey Granny?" Winry called, coming down the stairs with her flip-flops slapping. Pinako was lifting bottles from Ed's nightstand and reading the labels with the sound of Winry approaching before the girl knocked on the door. "Granny?"

"Stay out Winry!"

"Why?" Winry called in, confusion blooming in her voice. "Is everything okay? I can help, Granny!"

"No!" Pinako said. Ed had not stopped crying, and wasn't trying to hide it the way he usually did. He was deep in sorrow. His mind was falling apart. "Go find Alphonse and get that oversized tea kettle doing something useful!"

Winry fell into a puzzled silence before becoming annoyed. "Like what!" Winry asked. "He's too big! He's breaking stuff!" Winry leaned to the keyhole when Ed's crying escalated and became audible. "Are you sure everything is okay?" Winry sounded worried now.

"What am I gonna do?" Ed sobbed.

Pinako heard Alphonse asking her the same question. She stood up and wiped the tears off Ed's face with care. "Ed, it's okay. Now hush up," she whispered. "You're going to frighten Winry."

Ed shook his head. He inhaled as largely as he could and at the top of his lungs screamed out, "_I hate this!_" He was angry, inside he was raging, but stuck on his back unable to move he didn't know what to do with his building anger. Everywhere he looked he saw his own defeat, and doors which were once open were nailed shut. There was only this. There was only debilitating regression into a vegetable state. "I hate it! _I hate this!_"

Winry opened the door and rushed into the room in complete alarm.

"Winry!" Pinako yelled at her. "Dammit girl, shut the door!" Winry startled and did so, but stayed inside and far from the bed. "Listen up now, we ain't telling Alphonse nothing about this," Pinako said, quickly filling a syringe. She felt heavy with guilt for not diagnosing how close Ed was to despair and mental abuse. Self-electing patients weren't suffocated the way Ed was, and Pinako felt a gaping hole in her care. _She had let Ed walk to the edge, and if she didn't act, she was going to let him throw himself right off._

Ed was surrendering because it was the only way he knew to make this all stop. Living had grown into a terrible chore, and the cradle of a long sleep sounded welcoming. Someplace dark, quiet, and painless, was better than a sterile white world of anguish. To break the chain of living everyday trapped in bed, with your body in pain, and your mind fully alert, Ed was looking for the escape hatch.

"He can't know," Pinako said firmly.

"Know what?" Winry asked, before jumping when Ed took a swing at the needle. His anger gave him new unexpected strength.

"Fuck off!" Ed screamed at Pinako.

Winry slapped her hands over her mouth and gave a tiny shrill cry of disbelief, before shouting, "Ed, don't swear!"

Ed was oblivious and charged forward, screaming, "Get that the hell away from me! I don't want any more of this shit! It's messing with my head! _It's killing me!_" Ed screamed. "You're killing me!"

"That's not true, Ed!" Winry said, little eyes wide with sorrow.

Ed's head snapped in Winry's direction, and he screamed a vicious, "I hate you too, Winry!"

Pinako grabbed Ed's flesh arm and secured it to the bed, before gasping when he spit at her. He aimed for her face, and she felt his saliva hit her cheek the way hot soup bubbled up from a pot. "Edward Elric!" Pinako yelled, giving his arm a scolding yank. "You better thank the Lord in heaven I can't discipline a boy as sick as you!" Pinako wiped his shoulder with antiseptic quickly.

"Stuff it, you old bitch!" Ed was furious. "You dilettante excuse for!" Ed's sentence lapsed when he again saw the syringe in Pinako's hand. His anger snuffed out, and he broke into pitiful whining. "No, no I don't want that." His aggression dwindled into sniveling tears. "Please, please!" Pinako ignored this and stuck him.

"Winry! Get over here and cuff his hand down!" Pinako said, keeping Ed's arm anchored while he wiggled and tried to yank it away.

Winry was motionless. The concept of tying Ed to the bed was difficult to her, and she stared at Pinako with her jaw unhinged.

"Now!" Pinako yelled. Winry scrambled forward and yanked the mattress cuff up to Ed's wrist. With shaking hands she wrapped it on and closed it tight before jolting back with guilt. "And his ankle."

"What!"

"Do it!" Pinako snapped. "I am not sure what's happening, but he's going ballistic. I ain't gonna have him hurting himself. Now tie him down!" Winry raced to the foot of the bed and strapped Ed's single ankle in with his chest leaping. Ed was beginning to relax with the injection, but the tears were still rolling off his face.

"I...don't think I can live like this..." Ed whispered. Pinako felt her throat tighten. She released Ed's arm and stepped back. His pink and irritated shoulder squeezed out a single drop of blood when he lifted his arm the single available inch and tested the restrains. "I won't live like this," Ed whispered. He dropped his arm to the bed in cessation. "I won't do it…I won't live like this."

Winry turned a look of desperation to Pinako. "What's he saying?" she whined.

"He doesn't know what he's saying," Pinako said sternly, sending Winry a forced, but reassuring smile. "He doesn't mean it," she reassured.

Ed gave a bitter sardonic laugh, and with a tone dripping with self-loathing disgust said, "Oh, I do too." Ed's voice was hideous. "I know _exactly _what I am saying." His words were sharp and aggressive. "I know how to do it, you think I can't? I know how to do it."

"We're going to get you something to feel better Ed," Pinako said, stepping closer to the bed side and studying his twisted expression. Ed had his face curled into something of vile repugnance, but his eyes were different. They were weak, desperate things, begging to be saved.

Pinako cupped Ed's jaw line and gave his face an affectionate squeeze. His gaze was painful, and she nodded, as if she could hear his thoughts.

_Take me away from this, _Ed begged, _Make it all stop, please._

"Winry, I've got this now," Pinako said softly, staring into Ed's eyes. "Please go and find Alphonse, tell him what I said."

Winry left silently, and once the girl was gone, Pinako took a deep breath and leaned down to Ed's face. She stopped with their noses inches apart and whispered to him. "Now you listen here, Ed." Ed became irritated with her tone. "If you do a single thing to hurt your body..." she paused and let him think. She was still the adult, steps ahead and accurate in her prediction of what his child self might do. Before she saw the Elric basement she would have been inclined to think he would never raised a weapon to himself, but now she didn't know what Edward Elric was truly capable of when motivated. His words scared her. She couldn't manage a suicide watch in her tiny farmhouse, and the last thing she needed was one little girl, and one small boy trapped in a suit of armor, finding a dead eleven year old. If Ed was looking for a surface to lean against, she'd give it to him. If he was looking for a force to make him feel alive, she'd bring down her wrath. _Death sounded easier than life, but Trisha didn't raise a coward. _

"…or threaten your life…you better think of a way to explain it to your mother when you see her." Ed gasped, and went rigid with alarm. "Trisha ain't going to be happy or proud of you for being so weak you left Alphonse all alone." These words made Ed panic, and he began fast chest-hitching breaths. "You'll make her so upset." Gently Pinako left him and took a moderate anti-depressant from his nightstand. "She'll be so disappointed in you, Ed." She filled an oral syringe with a strong dose, while pushing him to painful tears of fright. _If he wanted to know where the line was, she would show him, so he wouldn't have to look for it again._ "Think of Trisha's poor disappointed face."

Ed yanked at his wrist. "She!—she!—she!" he sputtered, struggling against his restraints. "She! I—I! I can't! She!"

"Quiet." Pinako bent down and brought the syringe to Ed's lips. "Drink this, Bean." She held a rag to his chin. "It will make you feel better." Ed didn't want the medicine. He turned his face away and squirmed. Pinako took his jaw and cheeks in a gentle pinch and forced the syringe into his mouth. Ed grimaced. Insulted he struggled to free his head, but strapped down he had no control. Pinako squeeze the medication forward, and Ed had to swallow it.

Pinako did this cautiously. She didn't want Ed spitting mouthfuls at her or into the sheets, and she didn't want him to choke. She gave him small teaspoon sized doses with plenty of time for him to swallow and breathe before continuing. When she was done she let his face go, and he lay panting with his eyes closed.

"You're a good boy Ed," Pinako whispered. She took the rag from his neck and chest and wiped it over his mouth before leaning down and kissing his forehead. "You go ahead and sleep," she said. "From now on I'll give ya that every evening." Ed was silent as his body grew heavier and came to relax with the prescription. "Call us if you need anything."

With depression brewing Pinako felt frightened Ed might breech topics with Winry and Alphonse she didn't want them hearing. He was left staring at the ceiling from sun up until sun down, and she could only imagine where his thoughts were. Although they did their best to spend time with him, and read to him, there was no substitute for freedom. Ed was going to respond to what had happened to Trisha, his home, Alphonse's body, and his own, and Pinako didn't know what to expect.

She was never one to over medicate, and avoided anything she found to be unnecessary. Yet, she felt there was no denying she should have prescribed this sooner. It was a certainty Ed couldn't heal his body if he was focused on climbing out of his mind, and he was just a little thing. He had a child's view of the world, and children were confused with death and drowned in its sorrow. It was likely Ed managed to piece himself together after Trisha passed with the idea he'd bring her back, and now the real loss might hit him.

Pinako kept herself up thinking about this. She sat at her kitchen table holding an untouched cup of tea staring out the window and seeing nothing. She didn't have it in her to make dinner, and served Winry leftovers. She felt drained with the suggestion of what might be coming, and the idea it was somehow worse than what they had. Financially Ed would be a great set back, and she would have to balance their winter budget very carefully. He was polluting the entire house with his consenting corrosion. Monopolizing all of their time, and leaving Alphonse like a metal phantom unable to make use of himself and suffering the isolation of his idol existence.

Desperate, Pinako drove forward with Ed's care plan to make sense of things for herself and the children. She wasn't ready to give up, and because she was stubborn, she wasn't even ready to slow down for the roadblocks that were quickly appearing. She finished the week at rapid pace.

She took the feeding tube out in the early morning so Ed was too groggy to truly experience it. It was unpleasant for him, uprooting through his nose and trailing snot down his face. Then she scrubbed him in bed. His change in medication left him almost loopy. His mind drifted in-and-out, and he found common actions funny and giggled as if deranged. He took food better that afternoon. She made a similar concoction, changing her berries to raspberries. Ed was again overly interested in his mouth and ate slow, playing with his tongue and food like an infant. He continued to sleep absorbent amounts, and Pinako could barely get him to stay awake enough for dinners. He fell asleep three times, once with his mouth full, and once with the spoon half in it.

Standard procedure came to continue Ed's restraints. While depressed Ed didn't seem to mind. He was alive, but not certain he cared, and Pinako prodded him into conversation as best she could. His skin was growing irritated with his confinement to the bed, and she was relieved when he became upset and verbally combative when she addressed it. She rolled him to his stomach, washed his entire backside and then applied a heavy skin care treatment they used only for bed ridden patients. Ed's response to her coating his naked self was the best Pinako had seen in days. He hated it, shoved at her, wiggled, and swore. Pinako found his anger reassuring. In response she selected one of Winry's periodic romance novels, and began reading that to Ed in place of their gender friendly novels. After thirty pages Ed resumed his anger, and made hideous remarks about the intellect, likability, and even the plausibility of the characters and story. When the lead female and male kissed for the first time, he was groaning and begged for the reading to stop.

Pinako loved it.

As the days progressed Ed was better at sitting up, and Pinako let the boy take to feeding himself. This was a disaster she tolerated. Ed grabbed what he wanted with his single hand and ate sloppily at a concerning speed. Pinako was now certain something he was on, and she couldn't figure out what, was affecting his taste, and heightening the sensitivity of his mouth. As a result, Ed liked feeding himself. She kept him with mashed berries and oats, vegetables she steamed, mashed, and seasoned lightly, and common foods he recognized which she pureed. He was to have nothing he legitimately had to chew to avoid choking and digestive stress. This made Ed's eating more like food finger-painting, and because life was miserable for him Pinako reframed from scolding anything unless she had to, and let him play with his food. He'd dip his fingers into different items, and then suck on them together. Although Pinako didn't understand it, she could tell he was at least entertained, and that was something.

As they began closing the first month of Ed's time with them, they began to see what Pinako would honestly consider improvement. When Ed was awake he had his mind, and could hold conversation and remember things which had happened. The antidepressants kept his previous Unrecognizable behavior practically nonexistent, and Pinako unpacked one of their wheelchairs for him and tried to encourage him to get up, but he was insulted by the chair and wanted no part in it.

Pinako overruled this, and for two days she dressed him and set him in it. On the third day she stopped this. Ed only found comfort in the wheelchair one afternoon. Alone with Alphonse the armor took him a mile into the left field and they sat together. They read with Den running large circles about them before lying in the grass. At every other hour Ed hated it. He protested viciously when she put him inside it, and repeatedly demanded to be taken out until she agreed. He was inexorable, and humiliated by his handicap. Separation from his bed made his disability apparent to him in a way he hadn't yet experienced. Lying on his mattress he was fulfilling what he needed to do by resting, but up and about he was greeted with the could-nots of his life. He could not move himself or hold himself up. He was at the mercy of where they placed the chair, and supported by pillows to keep him stable. If she tried to feed him while he was in it, he became furious and called it an infant's high chair. He was appalled with how he looked, with his clothing sagging about his missing limbs, and so mortified by the movement of his catheter bag, which was disconnected from the bed and fit discretely to the inside of his upper thigh, he went mute for several hours. So Pinako gave up. Although she believed Ed's anger was good for him, using the wheelchair was tormenting him, and she packed it back up with him cussing the thing on the fourth day.

Pinako found herself lapsing into a creative stale mate as to how to get Ed moving in a way that both used his body and gave him enjoyment. She poured into her research and read energetically to find that key detail that had escaped her. Even though she didn't specialize in child automail surgery, she had to believe other people doing so had mastered this.

Surprisingly, Ed solved this puzzle himself.

Mid afternoon on the fourth week of Ed's recovery Pinako found his bed empty, and slid into a thoughtless confusion in his doorway. Ed was very much an item she moved around, so his absence stalled her like a motor losing power. Quickly she checked the room and lavatory, before calling for Winry. When she received no answer, she realized the house was silent, and it wasn't just Ed who was missing, it was all the children.

Yesterday it had rained heavily, and with the cloud coverage the wetness was lingering. Running through the lawn in bare feet and a mud speckled dress Winry was playing with Alphonse. The game seemed to be a form of tag, and Pinako watched from the window feeling perplexed both Winry and Alphonse were consumed without Ed. _If he wasn't with them, where the hell was he?_

"Alphonse!" Winry was carrying two dolls, and as she ran they were flapping about like limp flags. "Not so fast! Not so fast! Cheater, cheater!" She was laughing, but part of her sounded serious. Alphonse was capable of tremendous speed, and pounced like a tiger with sudden bouts of it. Winry was having fun, but she also recoiled with timid screams when he launched. She had her hair in two braids and hugged her arms to herself when he came, before swatting at him with her dolls.

Near the deck Den lay watching them. He wasn't an overly bright dog, but he was a dog smart enough to know Alphonse was an entire locomotion of force, and was weary. His ears were up and his eyes were fixated on the kids, but he didn't take part.

"Winry, give me those stupid dolls!" Ed's voice came suddenly, and Pinako was shocked. She opened the back door and stepped out onto the deck with confusion. She couldn't see him anywhere in the yard.

"No, Ed!" Winry whined, hugging them. "I need them!"

"Give them to me then, you're going too slow carrying them, and the game isn't fun if we always catch you!" Winry stood facing Alphonse hugging her dolls fiercely. Trying to persuade her, but sounding dreadfully annoyed, Ed said, "I'll take good care of them." Pinako was just about to call to Winry and ask where Ed was, when he made himself known as one stick thin arm extending forward from Alphonse's stomach. His tiny hand opened like a flower and hung in wait for the dolls to be handed over.

"Don't drop them," Winry said, approaching Alphonse and handing them into Alphonse's torso as if she were standing at an open window. A few more words passed, but from the deck Pinako couldn't hear them, and she went quickly to the railing.

"Alphonse!" Pinako called, and Alphonse's metal head swiveled to face her. "Where's your brother?" she asked sternly. Alphonse didn't answer, but Winry's expression cringed with anxiety.

"I'll put him back real soon!" Alphonse said, whining immediately. "Just let us play for a little bit!"

"What?" Pinako asked, heading off the deck. She crossed the lawn quickly, and as soon as she was within range Alphonse began echoed whining as if he were in trouble. He stepped back, turning to face Pinako's approaching self, and Ed was revealed sitting inside Alphonse's torso on several pillows and wrapped in blankets.

Pinako was speechless. Alphonse had transmuted the front of his chest plate to have a window. The frame of it was thick, so Pinako understood he had simply pulled the metal away from a focal point, to create a hole. It was large enough to see into the cavern of his body, and more than large enough for two body pillows, and her adopted grandson to be put inside.

Ed shrunk into Alphonse's shell as if he could hide as soon as Pinako was insight. Pinako was terrified with the idea of Ed's delicate body being put into a shaking tin can in dank outdoor weather. She went to Alphonse, reached in, and felt Ed's tiny face. There was a sharp breeze cutting through the fields, and Ed's cheeks and nose were cold.

"You took your brother outside without asking me?" Pinako asked. In shock she lifted her gaze to Alphonse before accusingly to Winry.

Winry began shaking her head at once. "They were really careful!" she protested, pointing into Alphonse's open body. "Alphonse put lots of blankets inside so Ed can't fall out!" Winry's explanation made it clear the brother's had decided to do this together, and she had either come in afterward, or found out during.

"You can't keep me locked in that bed!" Ed screamed suddenly, slapping Pinako's hands off. "I can do what I want! I am a free person! I am not an invalid! I want to play outdoors too!" Ed shoved Pinako's hands out of Alphonse's body. He was angry, and Pinako was shocked. Tucked under his left arm was Winry's favorite rag doll Sarah, and stuffed along the left hand side of him were several of his books. He had packed himself inside Alphonse the way a child packs a bag to run away from home.

"Ed," Pinako said, stunned with his behavior. She was scared he'd hurt himself, recklessly play until he was ill with exhaustion, and confused as to where his catheter was, but all she managed was, "you're cold."

"I can get him a sweater!" Winry said, before bolting for the house.

Ed glanced at Winry when she took off before shaking his head sloppily. "Don't take me back inside," he said, breaking into tears. "I want to play outside too. I want to do stuff I used to do. I'll ask next time, I promise. But I want to…" Pinako reached in and covered Ed's mouth with her hand. She had no intention of taking him back to a stationary bed if he could exercise himself like this. She felt heartbroken he found her approach threatening, and was distraught enough to cry.

"Bean, I didn't say nothing like that," Pinako said, breaking a wide smile. _He was up! He was moving! He was healthy! _"Now you relax, of course you can play outside." Ed was frowning skeptically, with his brow tight and angry, and his little mouth cranked down in an acute sulk. "Who said a microscopic speck, such as yourself, can't play outside with the rest of the children? You're not so small you'll get lost in the grass," Pinako said, beginning to laugh. Ed's jaw dropped with outrage, and she knew he was going to have a fit with her words. "You wear your sweater and keep warm. When you feel tired, come back inside, and get some sleep."

Pinako stepped back. Ed was sputtering with indignation. "Who! Who! I am not a microscopic speck!" he yelled. "I won't get lost in the grass! Who are—are you calling someone who is as small as an ant, you old hag!"

Winry came running from the house holding one of her zip up sweaters high over head. She ran to Alphonse's side out of breath, and pushed it into the window to Ed. "Here…Ed," she said, panting heavily. "Put that…on…" Winry looked to Pinako and gave one of her brightest, most innocent, grins. "We'll be…super careful…and take Ed in…before he gets…tired."

"No one is taking me anywhere! I am not a dog!" Ed yelled, "And why did you get me your sweaters, Winry! I don't want to wear girl clothes!" Ed was putting Winry's sweater on even while he complained, and Pinako backed away from the armor so she could watch Ed move around inside of it. As dangerous as it sounded, he was padded into a small space and seemed to have a good handle on himself.

"Well, you don't have any sweaters here," Winry said. "So I got you one of mine, would you rather I have not gotten you one?"

"Shut up, Winry," Ed muttered sourly, struggling to latch the flower shaped zipper so he could zip it closed. Winry had grabbed one of her thickest sweaters, but it was pink, and had a pattern of little red hearts scattered about it.

"Don't tell me to shut up," Winry whined. "Now hang on tight to Sarah, don't let her fall out, Ed."

"Yeah, yeah," Ed grumbled, grabbing Sarah by the head and forcing her tiny cloth body tight into his pillow with careless grace. "There, I wedged her in tight."

As soon as Winry knew the dolls were safe she took off into the yard, and Alphonse followed in one slow hesitant step, nervous of Pinako's surveillance. "Hurry up, Al!" Ed cried, pointing forward with his single hand. "Run! Run! She's getting away! Forward! Run!" Ed leaned forward and poked his head out of Alphonse like a kangaroo baby sprouting from its mother's pouch. "Hold on, Winry!" Ed called, before looking up to Alphonse's head. "Charge, Alphonse!" Ed reached into the hatch, grabbed Sarah's head, and used her rag body to smack upward at Alphonse so he would see it. Down the lawn Winry was taunting the boys with her hands on her wiggling hips sticking her tongue at them. Most of it constituted the word na-na, but mixed in were defacing statements such as, the Elric boys are slow, and the Elric boys are losers.

"She's calling us slow!" Ed cried, pulling back into the hatch and yelling upward to Alphonse's head. "Charge forward, Alphonse! Get her!" Ed reached out and began a quick slapping pat to Alphonse's hull to motivate him, and Sarah was knocked out and into the mud.

Winry broke into shrill high pitch screaming.

* * *

The combination of depression medication and Ed's new-found mobility through Alphonse seemed to be the piece Ed was previously missing. Immediately his spirits began rising, and he regained a sense of himself he hadn't had in weeks. His color, strength, and opinions were returning, and Pinako took advantage of sudden smooth sailing to make quick runs into town for supplies. Along with costing them a fortune by depriving them work, Ed was also keeping her hostage in the farmhouse, and Pinako desperately wanted to get to the market.

On her outings Pinako left Winry in charge, and things went well. The boys were well-behaved, and Winry was not an assertive or dominant ruler, so they took no offense. They were in Winry's house after all.

During the third outing Pinako observed, Ed suddenly let loose wild screaming for Alphonse that was so loud Winry heard him from the porch. In a panic she dropped her sewing and ran inside with Den hot on her heels. Alphonse was ahead of her and moving much faster. Winry could hear the armor stomping manically, like someone beating a metal drum.

Sounding scared to death with Ed's urgent tone, Alphonse ran right to Ed's bed, and cried out "What Nii-san!"

Winry arrived seconds later, but she had to run around Alphonse's monumental body to even see the room. With the excitement Den lifted his front paws onto the bottom of Ed's bed and stood panting with his tongue out and his ears up.

In his bed Ed was hard as stone and clutching his blankets. His breathing was quick and his expression was pinched with endurance. He had been in bed for hours, and when patients were in bed it meant they needed no immediate care and were safe. It was similar to placing an infant in a play pen, though they would never state that comparison out loud.

"Get Granny," Ed said quickly, tossing his head. "Get her! Go get her now!"

Winry was shocked. "She's not here, Ed!" Ed gave a loud miserable whine from the back of his throat. "What's wrong?" Winry asked, sweeping Ed with her eyes. He looked upset, but physically unbothered "Are you hurt?" Ed clenched the sheets in his grip suffering. "Ed?" Winry whispered, becoming scared.

"What's wrong with him?" Alphonse asked, hunching over the bed with his massive hands looming uselessly above Ed's twig of a figure. "Is he okay!"

As if on cue Ed's back snapped straight, and he cried out loudly, before letting it drizzle into tears. He began the honest pain enduring cry of his younger self after skinning a knee.

"Winry!" Alphonse yelled. Ed's crying was so confident it was unnatural. Alphonse knew his brother didn't cry freely in front of other people, and Ed certainly wouldn't have done so in front of Winry. "What's happening! Do something!" Winry's jaw was hanging open, and she was clutching her hands together looking stricken with shock. "When is Granny coming back!"

"I don't know!" Winry panicked. She ran to the bottom of Ed's bed where his chart hung, and ripped it off. Den jumped down from the bottom of the bed and began a quick repetitive walk from one side to the other, his automail leg tapping loudly. "Okay!" Winry announced, slapping it down at Ed's side and dragging her finger down the lists of funny names and numbers Alphonse didn't understand. "Okay! We're—ah—okay, we're ah—um, okay, just let me think for a second!" Winry turned to Ed's nightstand, and ripped it open. "We need to find out what's wrong with him, Al," Winry said, pulling out a small bin of supplies. "This is super-super important, can you help me?" Winry lifted a desperate gaze to the armor. Ed was shamelessly crying where he lay, and listening to it was awful.

"I don't know how!" Alphonse cried, grabbing his head in panic.

Winry nodded. She looked into the bin she held and extended the thermometer to Alphonse. "Put this in his mouth, and get a reading," she said, voice going calm. Pinako called it a surgeon's precision, and it was the sensation of your body conducting itself tranquilly, while inside you went mad.

Winry's hand was steady, and her gaze was focused when she offered a glass tooth pick to Alphonse's crushing work-glove hand.

"It's oral," Winry said, taking her hand back and whipping her nose on the back of it. "I'll tell you what I need you to do, okay?" Alphonse held the thermometer like a glass splinter sticking up from his leather finger. He nodded. Slowly his metal head tipped down to Ed, and in a soft caressing voice he said, "It's okay, Nii-san," he slid the thermometer into Ed's open crying mouth with the all the care in the world. "We're going to fix it."

Winry wrapped Ed's arm in a blood pressure cuff, and quickly sought his reading while holding his wrist for his pulse. "His heart rate is too fast," she announced loudly. "Something's…making all of his systems elevate!" Alphonse was struggling with the thermometer and had his single pinky against Ed's chin trying to keep Ed's mouth closed. "His temperature looks elevated."

Alphonse lifted the thermometer into sight and read it. Below him Winry was recording her information into Ed's chart with her gaze jumping in and out of different columns as if doing an invisible form of medical math.

"I think he's a hundred and one, but…he kept opening his mouth, so I am not that sure," Alphonse said.

"I just gotta try and look at all this!" Winry said, flipping through Ed's chart. "I gotta try to-to—to just figure out what…what's going on here." Winry's gaze was flying through Ed's data. "Make sense of…what's…what's new, or…" While reading Winry extended her hand to Ed's face and held up a peace sign. "Ed, how many fingers do you see?"

Ed lifted his flesh arm and slapped hers aside. "Will you _stop messing around!_" he screamed. He grabbed at his own face in dazed suffering. "Get that old woman! Get her! I need her! Get her! Ow, this hurts, I need her." Ed broke back into crying, and clutched at his bandaged shoulder. He sobbed out a long drawn out pronunciation of the word ow, before adding, "get her, please get her!"

"I can't make her magically appear!"

Den began barking with Winry's raised voice, and Ed reached to Alphonse. "Alphonse, pick me up!"

Winry threw her scrawny arms over Ed. "Don't you dare!" she said to Alphonse. "He stays in bed!" Ed was trying to roll to the side, and Winry jerked him flat to his back. "Tell me what's wrong with you, Edward Elric, I am the only one who can help you!" Winry fought the tears that were suddenly trying to come. "Unless you want to shrivel up and die, start talking! I can't identify what part of you is in need if you don't tell me where to look!" Her tears won, and she slapped them away angrily. She was not going to cry. Not now. He was not going to make her cry now.

Ed shook his head wildly.

"Tell me!" Winry yelled angrily, giving Ed a harmless shove the way she often did when he teased her. "Tell me, Ed!"

Ed grabbed at his pillow and pulled it up the side of his face to hide in it. "I need some clothes!" he cried.

"I'll get some, Nii-san." Alphonse moved to the dresser and pulled out a shirt.

"Get the biggest one he has!" Winry said. Alphonse obeyed and together they were helping Ed sit up, and slipping it over his head.

"I feel sick. I feel sick, like I am gonna puke," Ed groaned, completely limp with his weight held only by Alphonse's massive hand. "Ow-ow-ow, something's happening inside me!" Ed cried, grabbing at his stomach. Alphonse finished Ed's shirt with Winry buried back in Ed's chart reading his medication dosages, before Ed screamed. "Winry!" His tone was shrill, with immense need, and Winry jerked up with a tiny frightened squeak. "Get her now!" Ed yelled viciously.

"Alphonse, please tell him to stop yelling at me!" Winry began crying. She felt overwhelming stress barreling down on her. She was eleven. She didn't understand what was happening, and Ed wasn't allowing her to obtain the information that would help her figure it out!

"Ed, stop it, you're making her cry, and she's the only one who knows what to do," Alphonse scolded Ed, sounding panicked himself.

"I don't want her help," Ed cried. Alphonse moved his hand slightly, and the lack of support let Ed's head fall back. It was too heavy for him to hold up, and he hugged his stomach with his flesh arm whining loudly through grit teeth. "This really hurts!" Ed yelled. "It feel like there's something inside me, making it too tight!" Ed was straining out his words between large breaths. "Pushing at my stomach, and making it too tight!"

Winry stepped up to Ed wiping at her eyes, and rested her hand on his stomach. It was under the rumples of his sheets, but all she needed to do was lay down her palm. It felt like she was touching a balloon waiting to pop, and yanking her hand back, Winry cried, "Ed, you're swelling up!" She looked to Alphonse. "Hold his sheet steady, okay!" Winry yanked Ed's shirt up to his chest with Alphonse securing the blankets to Ed's waist, and Ed's stomach was distended, pink, and smooth with tension.

In shock Alphonse cried, "Nii-san, you're getting fat!" Ed looked like a plump fruit. His stomach was swollen taunt, and Winry's slight touch made Ed cry out.

"He's swelling up, it must be..." Winry trailed off uncertainly, before her tone peaked with excited discovery. "It must be an allergic reaction!" she cried. "That's it!" The cheer wore off quickly. "We've got to get it out of him!" Winry threw her hand to the side in a dramatic clearing motion. "I'll counter act his latest drugs, and clear them out!"

"Nii-san, do you think you can throw up?" Alphonse asked, giving Ed a shake. Ed was entirely wilted. His head was hanging over Alphonse's palm as if he were a rag doll. His labored breathing was fast panting, and sweat was trickling from his forehead.

"I don't think I can move," Ed moaned, through his tears. "I feel like I am gonna pop."

"It's okay. I can fix it now!" Winry announced, digging about in the drawers beneath Ed's bed. "I know all about your meds, Ed! I made them!" Winry stood up with a bottle, and looking at Ed's stomach. "Although..." she trailed off, cringing where she stood.

"What is it, Winry?" Alphonse asked. Alphonse's massive hand was close to Ed's face. With him unaware, Ed bit and held the leather palm. "Winry, what's the matter?" Alphonse asked. Winry was standing silently in concentrated mental debate. "Why are you just standing there! Can you help him? I don't want him to explode!"

"Neither do I, Al! But I am worried about how much to give him!" Winry said, staring at a brown medicinal bottle with indecision. "Plus, there might be a better way, but I…so..." Winry silenced and thoughtfully picked up a second bottle.

"Just get it out of me!" Ed yelled, into Alphonse's hand. "I don't care what you do! It hurts, it really hurts!" Ed tossed his fist to the side and it slammed Alphonse's hollow metal body like a drum. The echo of it scared them all, and Den ran from the room.

"Don't hit me, Nii-san!"

"Okay," Winry said, replacing the first bottle. "But you can't blame me later, Ed, that wouldn't be fair!" Winry filled a small oral syringe and brought it to Ed's mouth. Ed sucked eagerly with short swallows, gasping for air. His eyes were locked on Winry as he drank. With his body too damaged to hold itself up, the only power he had left was in his eyes. She gave him two dosages, and they each tasted very different.

"How fast?" Alphonse asked.

Winry backed up capping the last bottle slowly. For a moment she stared at Ed, stunned with how quickly he became unrecognizable.

"Fast," Winry said, before breaking from her spell. "Al, you need to get him up a bit," She shoved the medicinal bottles haphazardly onto Ed's nightstand, and bent down to the lower drawers. As if half asleep, Ed spit the oral syringe from his mouth and it rolled off him and dropped to the bed. "I am going to get a bedpan under him." Alphonse shifted Ed to lift him.

"Wha—A what?" Ed cried, turning to Winry.

Winry stood up holding the silver dish. "Ed, you have to let me put this under you, it's necessary."

Ed choked. _"What did you just give me!"_

"Something to counteract your morning meds, and something to flush your system out! We only have a few minutes!" Winry said urgently.

"_I said fix me!_" Ed yelled. "I never said I wanted to shit my brains out!" He shoved the bedpan away. "_Winry!_"

"Well, I am sorry!" Winry cried. "This is the fastest way I knew how! This is how it goes! I don't want you to pop!"

"I am not using that!" Ed cried, dropping back to whiny tears. "_I can't believe this! _I feel sosick!"

"Nii-san, Winry might be right," Alphonse said quickly. "We should listen to her."

"No! We're not listening to—are you nuts!" Ed screamed, "I can't! I am not!" Ed grabbed his stomach when they heard it rumble. He groaned. "How could you do this to me_,_" Ed cried pitifully. "_Why would you Winry!_"

"Ed, please," Winry whined.

"No! Help me up then!" Ed pointed dramatically to the lavatory door, and Alphonse was nodding, but Winry was shaking her head.

"Not unless you want me to disconnect your catheter!" Winry said. Ed whined with despair. "You want me to? I can." She didn't know what she would do if he actually said yes, but Ed shook his head wildly.

"No!" Ed yelled. "No! No way! Don't even try and touch me!" Ed broke into sobs.

Pinako entered her Post Surgical room with her shopping basket full of fruits, and swept her eyes over the sight before her. From the second she'd set foot in the house all she'd heard was yelling. "What's going on in here?" she demanded loudly.

Alphonse spun half around and Winry snapped straight where she stood. The children responded as if they'd been caught committing a crime, and Pinako knew whatever the answer it wouldn't be good.

Alphonse was the first to speak, sounding desperate and hysterical. "Granny! Help Nii-san he's going to pop!"

Pinako looked to Winry for a report. "He—Ed—he was swelling..." Winry began whispering timidly, but then her voice went faint. Hugging a bedpan she looked like a little girl trying to run the post operating room, and that's what she was. _One child trying to look after another._ As skilled as she was, she was also eleven, and just like Ed, fell victim to her own childlike thoughts and perspectives.

Pinako set her basket down and went quickly to Ed's bedside. "Edward, what in heaven's name is wrong with you?" Pinako asked in her sternest tone. Ed was crying into his single flesh hand and she pulled it off his face, grabbed his tiny chin in a tight pinch, and forced him to look at her.

"_Your granddaughter!_" Ed sobbed. "I need some help," Ed admitted miserably.

Pinako looked to Winry expectantly and raised her eyebrows. "Well girl?"

"He's having an allergic reaction, I think the AM dosage change caused it!" Winry yelled, "His stomach is swelling up and I—I that's all I could think. So I gave him some of these!" Winry snatched one of the two bottles from Ed's nightstand and offered it to Pinako. In her haste she knocked the box of tissues and book Pinako had been reading Ed to the floor and not one of them noticed. "I didn't know what else to do!" Pinako glanced from the bottle to Ed, before laying a hand on Ed's stomach. "I took his vitals, and he's falling into distress, but it's sudden. I couldn't identify a single other change that could have caused it!" Pinako was silent and let Winry talk. The girl was describing why she would be a great automail mechanic, and had no idea she was doing it. "So it seems to be a response to a…" Winry trailed for a moment, struggling to recollect the proper terminology. "…a variance, so I think it's either an allergy or response to the dosage change!" Winry began belting her diagnosis at the top of her lungs. She was wildly defending her decision as if she was certain she was wrong. _Pinako was certain Winry was right._ "I thought the best course! Well," Winry stumbled again, "Well—I—Well, I thought the best course of action was to counter act his dosage, and flush it out right away!"

Pinako was silent and considered this. Ed seemed capable of making Winry second guess herself to death even while lying almost incoherent in bed, but Winry's reasoning was solid. "You made this decision?" Pinako asked kindly.

"_I am sorry!" _Winry slapped her hands over her eyes crying. "_I am_ _trying_!"

"You did good," Pinako said, offering a brief smile. "That was the correct decision. Let's get this under him."

"No!" Ed screamed, immediately shaking his head. "That's what!–"

"Shut up, boy!" Pinako gave the back of Ed's head a small slap. "You want to spill yourself all over these sheets?" she asked, placing her palm underneath Alphonse's massive arm and pushing upward. She never could have moved him with her strength, but with his visual sense he let her guide him, and she set the pan on the bed and positioned Ed.

Ed screamed with frustrated anguish when he was set onto it. His skinny thighs fell comfortably into the sloping grooves meant to hold them, and his loose shirt covered almost the entire dish.

"Take it out!" Ed yelled, beginning the cry of his five-year-old self, obeying orders he didn't like. This was Edward who did not want to go to bed, and would pitch a fit and sit at the bottom of the stares bawling in refusal, until Trisha went and carried him up. "Take out the catheter!" Ed sobbed, choking out great bursts of air and sputtering almost uncontrollably. "Take it out! I don't want to do this!"

"Take out the catheter?" Pinako was shocked.

"I…" Winry said, hesitantly. Pinako looked to Winry, and she was frantically twisting the skirt of her sundress with her eyes darting in rapid thought. "I—I gave him that as an alternative." Winry forced a quick shrug. "To make the patient more…comfortable and decrease...mental anxiety," Winry whispered, reciting the text she studied. "I…gave him the disconnection…as…an alternative."

Pinako smiled with pride. "Well, you started this diagnosis," she said, turning to Ed. "Edward, you want me to disconnect it?"

"_Yes!"_ Ed screamed. "Yes, please!"

"All right then," Pinako said. She grabbed rubber gloves and wiggled into them. Ed began sniffles that seemed aggressively out of his control while trying to get a hold of himself. He understood he was getting his way, the same way his five-year-old version understood when Trisha carried him upstairs the end had arrived.

Pinako moved Ed's shirt aside with her elbow and carefully detached Ed's external tube from his internal. "You're lucky Winry started all this," she teased. Ed didn't move, he stayed compliantly still for a procedure that normally made him squirm. "I would have made you sit where you are." She threw Winry some brownie points. Pinako nodded to Alphonse when Ed was disconnected and Alphonse hauled Ed up quickly. Pinako pointed to the lavatory. "Get him in there. Sit him on the toilet and hang onto him," she said, following the armor. Winry came a few steps and stopped.

"You think my diagnosis was correct?" Winry asked quietly with shock. "You do?"

"Not only was it correct, but it was thorough. You never forgot your patient," Pinako said warmly. Winry was wide-eyed, and Pinako gave her a proud smile. "Don't let that foolish little boy make you forget what you know so easily." Pinako stepped into the lavatory. "Now get." She shut the door in Winry's face.

In the tiny room Alphonse took up almost all the space. He had set Ed on the toilet, and Ed was doubled forward, unable to balance himself. Alphonse's mammoth hands were locked about Ed's torso like a clamp, and would have had the effect of a back brace if Alphonse wasn't allowing Ed to lean about without falling. Ed was grabbing at his severed thigh, which looked awkward on the toilet seat, as if worried it would slip in.

Pinako went directly to Ed and knelt down. "Edward, now listen here," she said, adjusting his hand off his bandaged leg. She gave the wall support handle to his left several loud drumming smacks so he would understand it was there, before placing his hand on it. "This room is designed for people missing pieces," she said. Ed was still crying with frustrated distress. "Grip down," she ordered. "And pay attention, or you'll have plenty of company while you go through this."

"No!" Ed shook his head. His face was already red with strain, and in a few minutes he'd be clearing himself.

"Grip down, Ed!" Pinako gave the handle another smack, and Ed grasped it tightly. "Come on now, you've done this a few times before. Now press your…" Pinako looked to the set of tiled foot presses protruding up from the floor in front of the toilet. Dangling only a few inches above it was Ed's flesh foot. It was an inconvenience he never fit her adult sized tools, and Pinako cursed. "Dammit, you've got small legs." Normally she improvised with her bath bins, and she grabbed the one holding washcloths and dumped it over. They were small folded squares, and the lot of them buried Alphonse's pointed left foot. The armor looked down and watched this, but said nothing.

Pinako set the empty bin over the tiled wedge and this made it taller. Next she moved Ed's slender bare foot on top of it so he could press down and wedge himself for balance using his two limbs. "Now press down," Pinako said firmly, giving Ed's knee a painless smack when he didn't respond. Ed immediately pressed, and Pinako looked to Alphonse. "Carefully, go ahead and let him go."

Alphonse seemed surprised. "You sure?" he asked, slowly releasing his grip.

"Was I born yesterday?" Pinako asked. "Yes, I am sure."

Alphonse released Ed slowly, and stepped back. Ed was left sweating and swaying in his cotton tee shirt with his single flesh arm and leg holding him in place. He lifted his gaze to Pinako when Alphonse released him, and with his face flushing a hot red, and his voice low and strained he said, "Get out."

"Ed, today if you think you can, you can give this a try without Alphonse holding you." Generally, this was how things were done, because Ed couldn't keep his balance. "You wedge yourself there, Ed," Pinako said, pointing to the red button on the wall. "Push this if you need help." She tapped it several times. Ed's head was bowed forward and he was letting it hang like a weight from his neck, but he peeked up enough to see this. "And you damn well better do it too. If you mess up this bathroom I'll take it out on your scrawny hide," Pinako bluffed. Ed nodded, sniveling where he sat. "Come on, Alphonse," she said, turning for the door before stopping when Ed slipped. He lost his foot press, and his weight was sliding out from under him before he quickly stabilized himself. "Oh for," Pinako said, tipping her head back with exasperation. Letting Ed pioneer this event solo, when he hadn't yet been able to, was poor judgment on her part, and irritably she said, "Never mind, stay Alphonse." She left, calling back a loud, "And don't let him fall, ya tin can!"

Pinako shut the door on both boys, and looked to Winry, who was standing alongside Ed's empty bed looking scared. "How much did you give that boy, Winry?" Pinako asked.

"Um…" Wintry held up the oral syringe and indicated the half way mark.

Pinako laughed. "Edward is in for a wild ride." Winry was horrified. "In the future, let's make sure Ed only receives no more than half an adult dosage as our default. You can always give him more." Winry nodded slowly, still in her trance. "You've got a while until you do child automail anyway. But Edward might have only needed a third that with his puny weight." Pinako picked up her basket with a heavy sigh. "I am putting this in the kitchen."

"Okay," Winry whispered.

"Go through his chart. Identify exactly what caused the reaction, and switch the drug out with something comparable."

"Okay."

After forty minutes Alphonse exited the lavatory carrying Ed. He was limp and pale as a ghost. Winry went to fetch Pinako right away.

"Do you feel better now, boy?" Pinako asked, opening Ed's bed with Alphonse standing at its side. Ed was silent. It seemed as if he'd slip unconscious with his skin wet with sweat, and his eyes dark bruises on his face. He looked awful. He was discolored, pale with his sickness, but flushed red in places with his fever, and drifting into shades of purple, yellow, and blue about his bandages where his body was bruised beyond reason, and stained with ointments. "Oh, Ed," Pinako said sympathetically. He cracked one eye, only a sliver, and looked at her when she spoke to him. "You look days dead, you poor thing." She laid her hand on his forehead and felt his fever before beckoning for Alphonse to lay him down.

Alphonse maneuvered Ed roughly, by laying his arms on the mattress and then trying to slide them out from under the boy causing Ed to drop almost a foot. Still, Ed didn't have the strength to complain, and only whined a bit before staring up at Pinako as she tucked him in. "That took a lot out of you I see," Pinako said, chuckling at her own joke. Winry turned to Pinako with a wide-eyed stare of shock. "Winry, he's your patient," Pinako said, taking a step back to disengage from the bed. Winry's eyes widened further. "What are you going to do for him?" she asked.

Winry looked quickly to Ed, and then to Alphonse, uncomfortable with their scrutiny. "Um…" She snuck up to the side of the bed and ever so gently took Ed's wrist and read his pulse. Ed moved his sliver of a gaze to Winry looking humiliated. "It's going to be okay now, Ed," Winry whispered. Pinako waited as Winry recorded Ed's pulse and temperature into his chart, documented the change in medication and series of events, before laying a cold cloth over Ed's eyes. Ed didn't move when he lost his vision. If you wanted to snuff him out, all you'd have to do was walk over and push in the knife. He was incapable of participation.

"How high is his temperature?" Pinako asked.

"Only a hundred and one," Winry said, trying to sound optimistic.

Pinako grunted with discouragement. As long as Ed was battling a fever, his body was wasting energy on things she didn't want it wasting them on. "Whatcha going to do with him now?"

Winry gave a heavy sigh. After laying the cloth on Ed's eyes her hand slid into his in what seemed to be a subconscious gesture of friendship. Thinking quietly she brought a small finger to her lips and tapped at it with her glittering fingernail. "His stomach is probably too exhausted to accept food easily at this time. I think he should sleep and eat later." Winry looked to Pinako for critique.

Pinako kept her expression unreadable. If Ed insisted on destroying Winry's confidence, she would drive the girl's involvement. "Will you induce sleep?"

"No," Winry said. She answered immediately, and her tone was sad in a distant way. She turned to Ed. He lay like a broken toy in his bed. "He'll find it himself," Winry said softly, before looking back to Pinako. Winry gave the old woman a small discrete eye flare and Pinako lifted a questioning eyebrow. "Just…" Winry said, adding a small quick nod toward the bed. "…connect the…"

"Oh, yes, yes," Pinako said, waiving at Winry to back away from the bed. Of course she'd connect the catheter. "Alphonse come here, I am going to teach you. In case any more madness happens," Pinako said, beckoning the armor to her side. "I don't want my granddaughter messing where she ain't to be messing so young. But don't take him from this bed," she said firmly. "This is for emergency use only. For _emergencies_, got that? You're unsanitary, and this is a bad idea."

Ed's breathing had begun to increase as he listened to Pinako's intentions, and he moved his flesh hand over his hips to ward her off. "…Wait a second," he said softly.

"Ed, don't argue," Pinako scolded, folding his sheet upward and exposing him from the knee down. "Alphonse you pay close attention, because if you do this wrong, you'll make a mess of your brother."

Ed squirmed immediately. "No, I don't want him to," Ed whined, shaking his head as much as he could while so fatigued. "No more madness. I promise."

"We promise," Alphonse said. "We'll be super good Granny. They'll be no more madness."

Pinako believed they had good intentions, but madness was always out of your control, and not something they could prevent. "You promise?" she asked them. They promised. "If madness happens again Ed, you going to let Winry care for you?" Ed was nodding. He wasn't verbally agreeing, but he was nodding, and Pinako took it. "Good," she said. She laid her hand on Ed's chest in a loving fashion before giving his chin a quick playful nudge. "Then rest up, you'll feel better soon."

She connected him herself, and left, shewing the children from the room. Under her breath she muttered a soft, "so much for that." It was clear there would be no more outings. Even with Ed relatively healthy he was too spontaneous, and she decided they would have to mange for at least the next two weeks, without leaving the house.

* * *

After several days of Ed sitting up periodically and feeding himself, she offered to permanently take out the catheter. Ed didn't want her touching him, and refused, but she wasn't truly asking. She adjusted him into bed with a fat privacy towel on his chest to limit his vision, uncovered him, and thoroughly disinfected his perinea area. Ed was absolutely horrified with this and wouldn't keep still. He coiled his thighs together squirming and begging for her to leave him alone. It was awkward enough he was breaking into tears with her wiping him, and she had to stop. Ed had a way of tugging at her heart-strings that other patients didn't.

Desperate for a way to make this easier for him, she set two of their alchemy marble stones on his chest. Each one had a small array which heated the stone just under the line of scalding. These were commonly used in their rehabilitation for massaging, but also for procedures like this, where you wanted the patient to think of something else. They were very expensive because they were an alchemy item sold for the common person, and designed in such a way you did not need to know alchemy to activate them.

Pinako placed the hot stones on Ed's chest, and the burning sensation made him jerk with fright. She placed his hand on top of them, flattening his palm, and told him to roll them around.

The sensation of something so hot moving on his naked flesh would distract him from the sensation of her wiping at his skin. He calmed slightly, but broke into whining panic when she pulled the catheter tubing out. It wasn't a pleasant procedure, and his size gave him great discomfort. She tried to explain it would be unfriendly, but Ed could not take comfort in her vague reassurances. He was scared with her hurting such a private area on his body, and kept reaching down to brush her off, secure his tubing, or grab himself for safety.

When it was over he held himself between the legs whining and fussing. Pinako promised him it would come to feel better. He protested with non-violent resistance when she moved his body about to care for him. Trying to keep his legs closed and pulled to himself, she lifted his good knee outward so she could access his slender penis. It was flushing a dark angry red with irritation, and she coated the tip with a cooling antiseptic anti-inflammatory to comfort him. It made it feel better, so he let her, but tolerated her only long enough to be coated, and then pushed her away and held his sheet to himself.

Pinako found Ed's modesty as reassuring as his anger, and decided all mediation putting him to sleep or helping him stay under was to stop. Induced sleep was not the best thing, as it destroyed Ed's body's ability to monitor itself with rest. It also reacted poorly with his depression medication, giving him strong doses in both the morning and evening, and she wanted him to continue to be up and active as much as possible in the afternoons. Having him mentally capable would be key.

Edward's recovery would rely on his body's ability to recreate the normal cycles and patterns within himself despite the missing limbs. No matter what Pinako did, as long as he had medicated assistance with sleep, getting him into a supportable daytime routine was impossible. Feeding him breakfast, or more accurately, getting him to want to eat breakfast meant he needed to be coherent enough to chew and swallow. This was something induced sleep seemed to make difficult. However, non-induced sleep allowed Ed subconscious activity, and on the first night Pinako was sleeping only two hours before Ed woke her screaming.

In a fit of absolute panic Pinako ran to Ed, and he was screaming as loud as he could and fighting something he seemed to believe he could not get away from while strapped down. Even after Pinako went to him, shook him, and spoke to him, it was ten minutes before she'd calmed him down to sobbing, removed the cuffs, and finally lifted him into her arms. As with an infant, she walked slowly about the room hoping the movement would calm him. Ed spoke all sorts of gibberish, clutching at her, and crying into her shoulder. He was engrossed in whatever he was dreaming, and half asleep Pinako walked about Post Surgical rhythmically patting his back and whispering into his ear to calm him. This was effective, but still took half an hour. By this time Pinako was sitting in her living room rocking chair with Ed curled in her lap and wrapped in a blanket. His dead weight was almost enough to put her to sleep if it wasn't for his constant twitching.

His natural sleep was unsettled, and so light he was almost awake. His muscles flinched, and jerked, and it seemed to both startled him, and stem from wherever his mind was drifting. He couldn't keep himself at peace, and kept waking looking scared and frantic, believing he was in his basement and Alphonse was missing. Pinako tended to this as best she could. She rocked him and told him where he was. "Go to sleep, Ed," she would whisper, sitting in her nightgown with her hair a mess of stringy curls about her head. "I gotcha." It took her several hours of this routine before she placed a hot towel on his forehead and sleep mask over his eyes. Then he was out, and around three in the morning Pinako followed.

She slept in her rocking chair holding him with Den at her feet. Winry woke her the next morning. Standing in her blue nightgown with little yellow ducklings walking along the bottom, Winry gave Pinako several perplexed pokes in the arm.

Pinako's head snapped up with a snort. Quickly she glanced about her living room, but it looked inviting. The sun was pooling in from the windows and the birds were outside chirping happily. With everything put away, her loved wicker couch and pillows, small pieces of oak furniture, and meager country décor looked quaint and welcoming.

In the middle of it Winry stood smiling with her blonde hair a rat's nest. "You were sleeping, Grandma," Winry said, grinning with amusement. "What happened?" Winry gestured to Ed who was nothing but a lightly snoring hot mess wrapped in his bed sheet.

"Nightmares," Pinako said, voice flat. She sat up slowly and let her aching body adjust from sleeping in a chair. "I think I was up all night."

"He's sleeping now." Winry studied Ed thoughtfully. Wrapped in a blanket with snarly hair and a sleep mask hiding his troubled expression, Ed resembled a patient, and Pinako could see Winry's medical self contemplating the day's needs . With the 'Edward' variable removed, Winry was an impressive resource. "He's sleeping really heavy actually."

Pinako snorted. "I am sure." She stood, and hoisted Ed higher in her arms. He twitched heavily, but didn't wake. She left for his room with him unbothered. "He's going to be hungry when he wakes up, even if he doesn't know it. If I am sleeping, get food in him."

"You're going to sleep?" Winry asked with surprise.

Pinako nodded. "What's more, this boy seems to be able to stay conscious long enough to go crazy so..." Pinako set Ed back in his bed. She lowered him slowly, and with great care, but he was dead to the world. "I am going to keep him strapped down in case he moves around too much." Pinako recuffed Ed's single wrist and ankle locking him flat on his back. He was tangled in his sheet and so tired she didn't care. "What time is it?" Pinako asked.

"Almost ten."

Pinako grunted, and laid her hand over her eyes before dragging it down her face. "Don't let him sleep too long," she said. She turned around and studied Winry. The girl was standing in bare feet and holding her recently used toothbrush. Pinako smiled with love for her granddaughter. "Wake him up in an hour if he doesn't wake himself." Winry nodded. "I mean it, Winry." This was important. Ed was disconnected from the bed, and she didn't want him wetting it. Not because it would create laundry, but because she knew he'd be mortified and that was an unnecessary set back. "Ask him if he's hungry, get him to drink, give him lunch if he wants it and let him eat as much as he wants."

"How long are you planning to sleep?" Winry asked, beginning to look confused Pinako was giving directions as if she were leaving on a trip. Pinako gave a heavy shrug and trudged from the room. She said only one thing when she approached the stairs.

"You're in charge." Winry watched Pinako ascend yawning. "I had him last night so you can have him now. Also, call my canning circle, I need someone to take Den until Ed's done with all of this." Winry's jaw dropped. "I mean it, Winry," Pinako said, yawning again. "It's too much, and too unsanitary. Ed's more susceptible than you think."

"Okay," Winry said softly, looking sad Den was going, and worried about Ed just the same.

"Have them come get him this afternoon."

Winry stood rooted in place until Pinako was out of sight. Then she crept to Ed's bed and studied his expression. He looked peaceful, and his skin was regaining healthy color. Softly Winry whispered, "Ed?" but he was lost in a deep sleep which bordered on incapacitation.

Quietly Winry adjusted Ed's blankets upward and gave him his medication while he slept so he wouldn't have to see the needles. Then she left to get dressed and call what Pinako referred to as, her ladies. Hopefully, today Edward would not do anything hard.

* * *

Curtain falls on Chapter four, and it was rather long.

I hope you're enjoying all. Brace yourselves, I have a much deliberated scene approaching. I argued with myself for a while on whether to remove it or embellish it further. Honestly, I still don't know if I am satisfied, but I wanted to be brave.

Please leave a review! Just because these are pleasant lengthy chapters and not cliffies is no reason to slack. : ) And trivia question – is there anyone in here whose curiosity for the story was peaked due to the cover image? I've been wondering how that went down.

Chapter 5: _Corpse Remodeling_, will be up next Friday 02/07/14. Hope to see you there.


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